He himself was very much the same with the exception of the docility. His good sense, his talents, his eye for the ludicrous--except in his own work--were admirable, and the ill-nature of his satires, with their frequent injustice and the strange ignorance they display of all literature except the Latin classics and French and Italian contemporary authors, does not prevent their being excellent examples of French and of the art of polite libelling. It is probable that Boileau might have fared better but for his inconceivable folly in attempting, in the Namur ode, a style for which he had not the least aptitude, and for the parrot-like monotony with which Frenchmen before 1830, and even some of them since that date, have lauded and quoted him and accepted his dicta. But the most lenient estimate of him can hardly amount to more than that he was an excellent writer of prose and pedestrian verse, a critic of singular acuteness within a narrow range, and a satirist who had a keen eye for the ludicrous aspect of things and persons, and a remarkable skill at reproducing that aspect in words. [Sidenote: Minor Poets of the later Seventeenth Century.] The list of poets of the century has to be completed by some of more or less importance who flourished in the later days of Louis XIV., and, in some few cases, outlived him. Brebeuf might have been mentioned before, as he was Boileau's elder, and, dying young, did not reach even the most brilliant period of the reign. But he is unlike any of the three schools who have been described, and his language is more modern than that of most of the poets who wrote before or during the Fronde. His principal work is a translation of the _Pharsalia_, in which both the defects and the merits of the original are represented with remarkable fidelity. Boileau, who found fault with his _fatras obscur_, allowed him frequent flashes of genius, and these flashes are rather more frequent than might be supposed, being also of a kind which Boileau was not usually inclined to recognise. Brebeuf is decidedly of what may be called the right school of French poets, though he is one of the least of that school. His minor poetry displays the same characteristics as his translation, but is of less importance. Madame Deshoulieres, still more unjustly criticised by Boileau, is unquestionably one of the chief poetesses of France; indeed, with Louise Labe and Marceline Desbordes Valmore, she is almost the only one of importance. Her poems, like those of most of her contemporaries, are of the occasional order, and have too much in them that is artificial, but frequently also they have real pathos and occasionally not a little vigour. 'Le Songe' is a very admirable ode, having some of the characteristics of the English Caroline school. Racine himself, independently of his dramas, and the choruses inserted in them, wrote some poetry, chiefly religious, which has his usual characteristics of refinement in language and versification. Anthony