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254 some in whom lingered the fancy, picturesqueness, and lyrical inspiration which Malherbe banished from French poetry. Théophile de Viau (1591-1626), whose philosophic "libertinism" connects him with an older generation, has many conceits besides the famous dagger which blushed for its crime, and generally they are poetical as well as precious.

"Si tu mouilles tes doigts d'ivoire                  Dans le cristal de ce ruisseau,                   Le Dieu qui loge dans cette eau                   Aimera s'il en ose boire"

comes from a poem. La Solitude, full of feeling and fancy and music, and Théophile can, at his best, build verses with the skill of Malherbe. But he is very unequal, and his odes to great men are as vapid and wearisome as the majority of such pieces at the time.

There is something of the same fancy and picturesqueness, mingled with tasteless conceits, in the earliest work—La Solitude and Le Contemplateur—of Saint-Amant (1594-1661), famous for his debaucheries, who visited England in 1643 with the Comte d'Harcourt, and wrote in l'Albion: caprice héroï-comique, a not very flattering account of her people, and their troubles. Saint-Amant's most characteristic work, however, is his detailed, realistic, Dutch-like pictures of convivial and tavern life, as the Cabarets, Le Poète crotté, Fromage, Gazette du Pont-Neuf, and his experiments