we owe the excellent collection of criticisms which he published under the title of _Les Grotesques_, the aim of which was the rehabilitation of the whole group of minor poets whom Boileau had disgraced and dismissed in his _L'Art poétique_ in order to make more room for the great authors who had observed the rules of Aristotle and the laws of taste. The poor fellows lay unread in the charnel-house of literature with a line of Boileau's upon their foreheads. Gautier, as the sworn enemy of everything regular and commonplace, undertook their defence. His love of the plastic and picturesque found no satisfaction in the study of the dignified authors who had sat writing with periwigs on their heads and lace ruffles at their wrists; but it gave him real pleasure to seek out all those forgotten, curious poets with the strange countenances and grimaces, in whose pages, for the most part sadly remarkable for their bad taste, there are nevertheless to be found many an amusing oddity, many a gleam of originality, many a witty or picturesque line, nay, whole poems as full of life as are the best of François Villon's and Théophile de Viau's. Though their muse was no beauty, there might nevertheless be said of her what Gautier wrote of an attractive woman: "Elle a dans sa laideur piquante Un grain de sel de cette mer D'où jaillit nue et provocante L'âcre Vénus du gouffre amer." And one of these poor poets of the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth century, who had lain drunk in the gutter, or hewn his way through the world with his rapier, or ended his life on the gallows, offered, with his mad humour and his verse, just such a silhouette, just such a characteristic, vivid profile as Gautier loved to sketch. By his own wish young Théophile was taken from school and placed as a pupil in the studio of Rioult the painter. The youth himself, as well as his relatives, overestimated the talent he showed for drawing and painting, which was in reality merely the subordinate supplement to his absolutely unrivalled gift of picturesque writing. It was Victor Hugo who decided his career. When Hugo blew the horn of Hernani, Gautier answered to the call and forsook painting for literature. But he never lost the habit he had acquired of looking at things from the painter's point of view; and his conversation, and those parts of his writings (such as the preface to _Mademoiselle de Maupin_) where he expressed himself with the same freedom as in conversation, were always plentifully larded with that artistic slang for which the French studios are famous.