Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/63



most jolly and genial smoker, toper, rover, soldier, and poet, after deservedly enjoying great celebrity during his lifetime, was almost forgotten, even in France, until Philarète Chasles called attention to him by a brilliant article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1839, under the title, "The Victims of Boileau: I. The Guzzlers (Goinfres). Marc-Antoine de Gerard de Saint-Amant." This was followed, in 1844, by Théophile Gautier's sympathetic and picturesque sketch in Les Grotesques, a series of ten portraits of half or wholly forgotten French humorous and humoristic poets, from Villon to Scarron, including Théophile Viau and Cyrano de Bergerac, also men of real genius. Finally, in 1855, C. L. Livet edited, with a careful prefatory memoir, a complete edition of his works, including many pieces never before published, in two vols., in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne (P. Janet, Paris), so that all the world might again read what all the world had of old admired. In English the only notice of him that I have met occurs in that bright and pleasant book, "The French Humourists from the 12th to the 19th Century," by Walter Besant, author of "Studies in