The dainty trifles of the school of preciosity fluttered at least during the sunshine of a day. Its ambitious epics, whatever attention they may have attracted in their time, cannot be said to have ever possessed real life. The great style is not to be attained by tagging platitudes with points. The _Saint Louis_ of Lemoyne, the _Clovis_ of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, the _Alaric_ of Scudery, the _Charlemagne_ of Louis le Laboureur remain only as evidences of the vanity of misplaced ambition. During twenty years JEAN CHAPELAIN, a man of no mean ability in other fields, was occupied with his _La Pucelle d'Orleans_; twelve cantos at length appeared magnificently in 1656, and won a brief applause; the remaining twelve cantos lie still inedited. The matter of history was too humble for Chapelain's genius; history is ennobled by an allegorical intention; France becomes the soul of man; Charles, swayed between good and evil, is the human will; the Maid of Orleans is divine grace. The satire of Boileau, just in its severity, was hardly needed to slay the slain. In the prose romances, which are epics emancipated from the trammels of verse, there was more vitality. Bishop Camus, the friend of Francois de Sales, had attempted to sanctify the movement which d'Urfe had initiated; but the spirit of the _Astree_ would not unite in a single stream with the spirit of the _Introduction a la Vie Devote_. Gomberville is remembered rather for the remorseless war which he waged against the innocent conjunction _car_, never to be admitted into polite literature, than for his encyclopaedic romance _Polexandre_, in which geography is illustrated by fiction, as copious as it is fantastic; yet it was something to annex for the first time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of adventure. Gombauld, the _Beau Tenebreux_ of the Hotel de Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable _Endymion_ by the supposed transparence of his allusions to living persons. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin relieved the amorous exaltations of his _Ariane_, a tale of the time of Nero, by excursions which touch the borders of comedy. These are books on which the dust gathers thick in ancient libraries.