FRENCH EPIC POETRY. 629 



incontestable drawbacks, and in the teeth of the harsh and 

 uncompromising criticism of the plucky young satirist Boileau, 

 we are bound to acknowledge that this much maligned poem 

 contains passages of intense beauty and cogent power. But to 

 do justice to the marvellous and heartrending history of the 

 Lorraine shepherdess, a fertile imagination and a warm heart 

 are indispensable requirement's. Chapelain must have been 

 sadly devoid of either. Hence the general frigidity of his epic. 

 A great defect of the poem is its disregard for externals and its 

 titter lack of beauty of form. With regard to external beauty, 

 Chapelain had not the faintest notion about genuine poetry. 

 How could such a thing be expected from a man who could 

 muster the sorry courage to write : 



Quant aiix vers et un langage, ce sont des instruments de si petite 

 consideration dans I'epopee, qu'ils ne meritent pas que de si grands juges 

 s'y arretent. On les abandonne a la fureur de la nation grammairienne. 



It Would be difficult indeed to imagine a more superciliously 

 shallow assertion. This incomplete sketch takes us up to the 

 i8th century, and to Voltaire's Henriade. In 1715, young 

 Arouet, then a mere stripling, happened to get into very hot 

 water. He had riddled certain important personages with his 

 caustic epigrams, and his father seriously thought of packing 

 him oil to America. M. de Caumartin intervened on his behalf, 

 succeeded in saving him from this disgrace, and took him to the 

 Chateau de Saint-Ange, where the two had the most enthusiastic 

 discussion about Henri IV and Louis XIV. One year after this, 

 v/hen the scapegrace had got himself into another scrape, he was 

 obliged to accept refuge at the hands of the Due de Sully. While 

 with this nobleman, he was again a witness of warm and frequent 

 eulogies of Henry of Navarre, and then it was that he conceived 

 the idea of writing a poem on this monarch. Such was the 

 origin of the Henriade, which records the struggles between the 

 Catholics and the Protestants, the efiforts of the party of the Due 

 de Guise to displace Henry III, the murder of this monarch, and 

 the progress of Henry of Navarre to the throne. Voltaire (then 

 still Arouet) began his poem in one of the dungeons of the 

 Bastille, where, for a couple of months, he had to expiate one 

 of the more serious of his youthful pranks. 



\A'hen at large again, he continued his poem, which he 

 entitled La Ligifie. Not unlike Chapelain, when his Pucelle was 

 in statu nascend'i, Voltaire spoke to everybody about this new 

 poem of his. and advertised it with that propensity to pufif and 

 hankering after popularity which characterises him throughout 

 life. The complete edition, entitled La Henriade, was not pub- 

 lished until 1728. An exile in consequence of his adventure with 

 the Chevalier de Rohan, Voltaire had then been living for two 

 years in London, alternately a guest of Lord Bolingbroke, Lord 

 Peterborough. Lord Chesterfield, and Mr. Falkner, and warmly 

 befriended by Dr. Johnson, Pope, Swift, Gay, Congreve, and 

 other men of letters. Here, he had more or less recast his poem, 

 adding new episodes, and when he had found a sufficient number 



