Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/275

Rh in mock-heroic suggested by Tassoni's poem. In this rather tedious kind the best work was done by Paul Scarron, whose Typhon and Virgile travesti are still known.

The representative poet of elegant conceit and badinage, the cleverest writer of "vers de société," was Vincent Voiture (1598-1648). The son of a wine-merchant in Amiens, who was also a money-lender, young Voiture, introduced to Paris society under the protection of the Comte d'Avaux and Cardinal de la Valette, became by his wit and literary facility the darling of the Hôtel. In the service of Gaston d'Orléans he saw campaigning, and visited Spain and the Low Countries, and Richelieu sent him as far as Rome; but he remained always a child of Paris. He was not professedly a poet or a man of letters, but simply an "honnête homme," who wrote occasional verses and letters to his friends and patrons. In short, he employed talents that might have done greater work to make himself the most amusing member of the society in which he moved. To amuse and to pay compliments is the sole aim of his poems as of his letters. How coarse the badinage could be which the refined Hôtel enjoyed may be seen from the wickedly witty stanzas to a lady who had the misfortune to be overturned in a carriage. His complimentary verses are very high-flown, and abound in the conventional mythology which Théophile deprecated, but they are kept from being