Marie-Joseph Chénier, in other respects besides his relations to his ill-fated and illustrious brother, appears to have been an unpopular and disputable person: nor, putting his considerable satiric power aside, can he be called a great man of letters. But, I think, his _Tableau de la Littérature Française depuis 1789_,[231] has been rather undervalued. It is not, of course, free from the common defects of these surveys, especially when taken _à bout portant_; it notices much that we do not want noticed at all, belittles important things, takes refuge in stock phrases and _clichés_ so as to get the business over. But it is often acute and very much less one-sided and hide-bound than La Harpe or Geoffroy—recognising, for instance, in opposition to the latter, that Blair is “always just” to French writers. And it supplies us, written as it was just before the dawn of Romanticism (for Chénier died in 1811), with some interesting and necessarily unbiassed views. People, he says,[232] do not read Le Bossu at all, and they read Bouhours very little. He greatly prefers Diderot and Marmontel (though he thinks them “paradoxical”) to Batteux; and if he is complimentary to Voltaire and even to Thomas, rejoices in Fénelon and Corneille. He cannot, or will not, understand Chateaubriand;[233] but he takes frequent opportunity, under the guise of noticing translations, to refer to and estimate English and German literature. In short, he is open to the reproach of “not knowing where he is,” but the very evidences of this are useful to us. [Sidenote: _Lemercier._] Still more relatively, and very much more intrinsically interesting, is Népomucène Lemercier—that singular first sketch of a Victor Hugo, who, naturally enough, would have none of Victor Hugo himself when he appeared, and who, in a cruel trick of Fate and Death, was actually supplanted by Hugo in his Academic Chair. It is unfortunate that Lemercier’s _Cours de Littérature Générale_[234] is not a very common book. It has something of the excessive generalisation of the eighteenth-century—men were struck by the effect of measured sounds and wrote poetry, &c.; and he still sticks to Kinds a good deal. But his independence is unmistakable. He slights the unities superbly; has what is, I think, the finest passage on Shakespeare written by a Frenchman up to his day, on “The English Aeschylus;” condemns _la pernicieuse manie de critiquer opiniâtrement_; qualifies and redeems his tendency to begin “in the air” with “_the_ chimerical,” “_the_ marvellous,” “_the_ allegoric,” &c., by invariably condescending upon particulars in the true critical way; and, as became the author of the _Panhypocrisiade_ and _Pinto_, defends Aristophanes against La Harpe. Unfortunately he followed (intentionally or not) Aristotle in confining himself to Drama and Epic. But he is a really stimulating and germinal writer, and represents the morrow among his own contemporaries. [Sidenote: _Feletz._]