So, when the Romanticists began to revive the classics and to discover far-distant ancestors in old French literature, they thought of Théophile: Boileau himself pointed him out to them. In Les Grotesques, Gautier rehabilitated him and called him a "truly great poet," esteeming that one cannot make bad verses when one bears the glorious Christian name of Théophile. To completely demonstrate this to us, he quoted several pieces by his namesake which he abridged and even tastefully corrected--a stratagem which revolted the scrupulous Sainte-Beuve. To tell the truth, now that we are free from romantic prejudices, it is difficult for us not to think that on this occasion, as on many others, Boileau was right. Among the poets of the time of Louis XIII, Théophile is perhaps the one whom we now read with the least pleasure. We find in him neither the beauty, the force and the style of Malherbe, nor that so lively sentiment for nature which gives so much value to various bits by Racan, nor the vigorous local color of Saint Amant. He shows a facile and sometimes brilliant imagination; but he lacks taste and restraint in a continuous and desolating fashion. La Bruyère has finely expressed this in comparing Théophile with Malherbe: "The other (Théophile), without choice, without exactness, with a free and unequal pen, overloads his descriptions too much, emphasises the details; he makes a dissection; sometimes he paints, he exaggerates, he overpasses the truth of nature; he makes a romance of it." Théophile, who had a brilliant mind, rendered justice to Malherbe; but he decorated with the name of originality his distaste for labor, his scorn of rules: Let him who will imitate the marvels of others. Malherbe has done very well, but he did it for himself. ***** I love his fame and not his lesson. ***** I know some who make verses only in the modern fashion, Who seek Phobus at mid-day with a lantern, Who scratch their French so much that they tear it all to tatters, Blaming everything which is easy only to their own taste. ***** Rules displease me, I write confusedly; A good mind never does anything except easily. * * * * * I wish to make verses which shall not be constrained, To send forth my mind beyond petty designs, To seek out secret places where nothing displeases me, To meditate at leisure, to dream quite at my ease, To waste a whole hour in admiring myself in the water, To hear, as if in a dream, the flowing of a brook, To write within a wood, to interrupt myself, to be silent by myself, To compose a quatrain without thinking of doing it.