Without pride, also, and without pretension, he could turn his own fame and labours into a jest. Going one day to present the order for his pension, which said that it was granted "on account of the satisfaction which the king derived from his works," the clerk asked him what sort of works his were. "Masonry," he replied: "I am an architect." At another time, when, passing Easter at a friend's house in the country, and being exact in fulfilling his religious duties, he made his confession to a country curate, to whom he was unknown, the confessor asked him what his usual occupations were? "Writing verses," replied the penitent. "So much the worse," said the curate; "and what sort of verses?" "Satires." "Still worse--and against whom?" "Against those who write bad verses, against the vices of the times, against pernicious books, romances, and operas." "Ah!" cried the curate, "that is not so bad, and I have nothing to say against it." [Sidenote: 1687. Ætat. 51.] His spirit of intolerance for "those who wrote bad verses," or approved them, was excited to its height by Perrault's[92] "Siècle de Louis Quatorze." This poem was the origin of the famous dispute as to the ancients and moderns, which "Swift's Battle of the Books" made known in this country. Perrault, with little Latin, and no Greek, undertook to depreciate Homer; and he had Fontenelle for his ally, who, with more learning and less taste, declared that, if the Greek bucolic writers had now first produced their pastorals, they would be scouted as wretched. Perrault did not content himself with the exposition of his opinion in his poem; he wrote a "Parallel between the Ancients and Moderns," in which he not only praised the good writers of the day, but even Chapelain, Quinault, Cotin, and others on whom Boileau had set the seal of his irony. [Sidenote: 1692. Ætat. 56.] The satirist could neither brook this rebellion against his fiat, nor the sort of blasphemy indulged in against those great masters of the art whom he was aware he but feebly imitated. He wrote several bitter epigrams against Perrault; and then, finding that by no explanation or translation could he make a mere French reader understand the sublimity of Pindar, he sought to imitate this poet in his ode on the taking of Namur. This was a bold undertaking, and it cannot be said that he succeeded; for the French language was then far less capable than now of expressing the sublime; and Boileau's talent was not of that elevated and daring kind which could invent new modes of expression, and force his language to embody the ideal and bold images that constitute the sublime. Still we must honour the attempt for the sake of its motive. "The following ode," he says, in his preface, "was written on occasion of those strange dialogues, lately published, in which all the great writers of antiquity are treated as authors to be compared with the Chapelains and Cotins; and in which, while it is sought to do honour to