Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/80

 64 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES for liberty, insane for rigorous discipline, the freest of men enamoured of fetters. Boileau was not con- tented with judging the poems of Saint-Amant; he went beyond his jurisdiction to deal with the private life; and his judgment, which would have been signally mean, even if true, is most ignobly base, seeing that it is false. In his first Satire, dating about six years after Saint-Amant's death, he writes : — " Saint-Amant n'eut du ciel que sa veine en partagc : L'habit qu'il eut sur lui fut son seul heritage ; Un lit et deux placets composaient tout son bien, Ou, pour en mieux parler, Saint-Amant n'avait rien. Mais, quoi ! las de trainer une vie importune, II engagea ce rien pour chercher la fortune ; Et tout charge de vers qu'il devait mettre au jour, Conduit d'un vain espoir il parut a la cour." Ask me not to try to translate. You remember Byron's very just characterisation of this species of verse (" Childe Harold," iv. 38) :— "And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, That whetstone of the teeth — monotony in wire ! " This general accusation of indigence is sufficiently refuted by what I have already told of the fortunes of Saint-Amant : at the utmost it could only be applicable to the last years of his life. In the words of M. Li vet : "Perhaps it would have been becoming to respect, and not to mock the poverty, happily only imagined, of a poet who had redeemed by seven or eight years of serious piety the wild errors of his youth. . . . Meanwhile, with the revenue of the glass factory of which he had the privilege, with the pension he