But the two individuals who first brought into French literature and naturalized the primal critical concepts of Italy were Chapelain and Balzac. Chapelain's private correspondence indicates how thorough was his acquaintance with the critical literature of Italy. "I have a particular affection for the Italian language," he wrote in 1639 to Balzac.[427] Of the _Cid_, he says that "in Italy it would be considered barbarous, and there is not an academy which would not banish it beyond the confines of its jurisdiction."[428] Speaking of the greatness of Ronsard, he says that his own opinion was in accord with that of "two great savants beyond the Alps, Speroni and Castelvetro";[429] and he had considerable correspondence with Balzac on the subject of the controversy between Caro and Castelvetro in the previous century. In a word, he knew and studied the critics and scholars of Italy, and was interested in discussing them. Balzac's interest, on the other hand, was rather toward Spanish literature; but he was the agent of the Cardinal de la Valette at Rome, and it was on his return to France that he published the first collection of his letters. The influence of both Chapelain and Balzac on French classicism was considerable. During the sixteenth century, literary criticism had been entirely in the hands of learned men. Chapelain and Balzac vulgarized the critical ideas of the Italian Renaissance, and made them popular, human, but inviolable. Balzac introduced into France the fine critical sense of the Italians; Chapelain introduced their formal rules, and imposed the three unities on French tragedy. Together they effected a humanizing of the classical ideal, even while subjecting it to rules. It was to the same Italian influences that France owed the large number of artificial epics that appeared during this period. About ten epics were published in the fifteen years between 1650 and 1665.[430] The Italians of the sixteenth century had formulated a fixed theory of the artificial epic; and the nations of western Europe rivalled one another in attempting to make practical use of this theory. It is to this that the large number of Spanish epics in the sixteenth century and of French epics in the seventeenth may be ascribed. Among the latter we may mention Scudery's _Alaric_, Lemoyne's _Saint Louis_, Saint-Amant's _Moyse Sauve_, and Chapelain's own epic, _La Pucelle_, awaited by the public for many years, and published only to be damned forever by Boileau.