Certainly the style is excellent; but it pales and seems nothing more than a very feeble sketch in comparison with the rapid and sombre pencil-strokes of the great Roman painter: "Trepidatur a circumsedentibus, diffugiunt imprudentes; at, quibus altior intellectus, resistunt defixi et Neronem intuentes." [130] See the letter to Perrault. [131] En vain contre le Cid ministre se ligue, Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrique, etc. * * * * * Apres qu'un peu de terre, obtenu par priere, Pour jamais dans la tombe eut enferme Moliere, etc. * * * * * [132] Aux pieds de cet autel de structure grossiere, Git sans pompe, enferme dans une vile biere, Le plus savant mortel qui jamais ait ecrit; Arnaud, qui sur la grace instruit par Jesus-Christ, Combattant pour l'Eglise, a, dans l'Eglise meme, Souffert plus d'un outrage et plus d'un anatheme, etc. * * * * * Errant, pauvre, banni, proscrit, persecute; Et meme par sa mort leur fureur mal eteinte N'aurait jamais laisse ses cendres en repos, Si Dieu lui-meme ici de son ouaille sainte A ces loups devorants n'avait cache les os. [133] These verses did not appear till after the death of Boileau, and they are not well known. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, in a letter to Brossette, rightly said that these are "the most beautiful verses that M. Despreaux ever made." [134] 4th Series of our works, LITERATURE, book i., _Preface_, p. 3: "It is in prose, perhaps, that our literary glory is most certain.... What modern nation reckons prose writers that approach those of our nation? The country of Shakspeare and Milton does not possess, since Bacon, a single prose writer of the first order [?]; that of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, is in vain proud of Machiavel, whose sound and manly diction, like the thought that it expresses, is destitute of grandeur. Spain, it is true, has produced Cervantes, an admirable writer, but he is alone.... France can easily show a list of more than twenty prose writers of genius: Froissard, Rabelais, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Moliere, Retz, La Bruyere, Malebranche, Bossuet, Fenelon, Flechier, Bourdaloue, Massillon, Mme. de Sevigne, Saint-Simon, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Buffon, J. J. Rousseau; without speaking of so many more that would be in the first rank everywhere else,--Amiot, Calvin, Pasquier, D'Aubigne, Charron, Balzac, Vaugelas, Pelisson, Nicole, Fleury, Bussi, Saint-Evremont, Mme. de Lafayette, Mme. de Maintenon, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues, Hamilton, Le Sage, Prevost, Beaumarchais, etc. It may be said with the exactest truth, that French prose is without a rival in modern Europe; and, even in antiquity, superior to the Latin prose, at least in the quantity and variety of models, it has no equal but the Greek prose, in its palmiest days, in the days of Herodotus and Demosthenes.