Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/79

SAINT-AMANT 63 Queen of Sweden. He gained great favour with this most eccentric daughter of Gustavus Adolphus ; and, when she visited Paris in 1656, and the members of the French Academy were presented to her, she recognised him with particular pleasure. In 1653 or 1654 his "Moses Saved" appeared under the title of "The Heroic Idyll," a title which naturally excited much criticism ; although, as he tells us, it was approved by the Academy, Little is known of his life after this period. Many of his old friends and patrons were dead ; the manners of the court were altogether different, and the style of literature in vogue was also materially changing. Moliere, Corneille, Racine, Boileau were shaping the grand classical literature of France, the literature of severe taste and rigid order; the wild caprice and license of Saint-Amant and his friends would no longer be tolerated. Philarete Chasles compares him in this, his decay, to Falstaff grown old, after Prince Hal had become Henry V. Boileau, with his narrow^ arrogant, stark common-sense; Boileau, who had not a glimmer of poetry or geniality in his composition, was the cold-blooded executioner of these riotous, rich-blooded rakes of Parnassus, these revellers whose Hippocrene ran red with wine, and who took such scandalous liberties with the chaste muses. The best of them, such as our Saint-Amant, had abundance of energy, wit, fancy — nay, imagination and genius, all abundantly lacking in the cold-blooded pedant and pedagogue Boileau. But they had not good taste — they were quite unregulated; they indulged in the most fantastic conceits, and their glaring faults were pitilessly condemned. Such are our neighbours — wild