After Cowley in date of composition, but before him in date of publication, Davenant in his _Gondibert_ shows traces of the prevalent ambition. He rejects all supernatural fables, and makes it a point of sound doctrine to choose only Christians for his characters. But that poem, too, broke off in the middle. In France the question had been as zealously discussed, and had been illustrated by experiments no less elaborate. In 1657, a year after the appearance of Cowley's _Davideis_, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin brought out his sacred poem of _Clovis_, with a great flourish of trumpets, and a long prose demonstration that its theme was the grandest a French poet could choose. The real supernatural of the Christian religion, so he argued, is a subject much nobler for poetry than the pagan mythology, as the sunlight is brighter than the shadow. The controversy dragged on till 1673, when Boileau, in the third book of his _Poetic_, settled the question for the nonce, and fixed the opinion of the succeeding generation of critics. He casts an equal ridicule upon _Clovis_ and upon the theory which it was designed to illustrate:-- The arts of fiction give the air of lies Even to the most unquestioned verities; And what a pious entertainment, too, The yells of Satan and his damned crew, When, proud to assail your Hero's matchless might, With God himself they wage a doubtful fight. So the burial of _Clovis_ was hastened by ridicule. Yet every one of the arguments brought against that poem by Boileau holds equally good against _Paradise Lost_, which Milton, knowing as little of Boileau as Boileau knew of him, had published some six years earlier. _Paradise Lost_, it might almost be said, is superior to _Clovis_ in nothing, except the style. By the force of his genius and the magic of his style, Milton succeeded in an attempt thought hopeless by the best critical judges of his century, and won his way through a ravine that was strewn with the corpses of his epic predecessors.