Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/64

 48 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Early French Poetry." The above have mainly fur- nished the materials for the following article. Marc-Antoine de Gerard, Sieur de Saint-Amant, was born, in 1594, at Rouen, near the famous abbey of Saint-Amant, whence he took the name by which he is generally known, and died at Paris on the 29th December, 1661. The details for his biography are but scanty, and chiefly drawn from scattered state- ments and allusions in his own writings. His father was a distinguished naval officer, two-and- twenty years in the service of our Elizabeth, in which he attained the command of a squadron. At one period of his life he fell into the hands of the Turks, and was for three years a prisoner in the Black Tower at Constantinople. His two brothers perished fighting against the Turks — the one at the mouth of the Red Sea, the other, who had served under Gustavus Adolphus, at Candia, where he commanded a French regiment in the Vene- tian service. Two of his cousins-german also fell fighting the Turks, and one of his uncles had been in slavery amongst them. Thus our poet had plenty of family reasons for detesting those infidels; and his natural love and reverence for wine may have been intensified by the fact that it was forbidden by the Prophet. His education was considerably neglected, as his father could not attend to it, and his mother seems to have died when he was young. Thus he learnt neither Greek nor Latin ; but, as he tells us himself, the familiar conversation of people in good society, and the diversity of wonderful things he saw in his travels, afterwards remedied the defects in his early training. He also mastered Spanish, Italian, and English ; was an excellent musician and elocu-