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It is a remarkable feature, though not perhaps a singular one, in the character of this great comic writer, that he was one of the most serious of men, and even of a melancholic temperament. One of his lampooners wrote a satirical comedy on the comic poet, where he figures as "Molière hypochondre." Boileau, who knew him intimately, happily characterised Molière as le Contemplateur.
Boileau was still living when Steele published his 'Tatler', and died in the year of the establishment of the 'Spectator'. Boileau, a true-hearted man, of genius and sense, advanced his countrymen from the nice weighing of words by the Precieuses and the grammarians, and by the French Academy, child of the intercourse between those ladies and gentlemen.
In the same way Boileau was right, as a critic of Literature, in demanding everywhere good sense, in condemning the paste brilliants of a style then in decay, and fixing attention upon the masterly simplicity of Roman poets in the time of Augustus.
He was never dazzled by the blaze of the Tuileries and the glare of temporary success. He might have said after Boileau, J' appelle un chat un chat, et Louis un fripon.
Literary taste and religious sympathies combined, in the case of Boileau, to exalt Pascal. The provincials could not satisfy for long the pious ardor of Pascal's soul; he took in hand his great work on the Verite de la Religion. He had taken a vigorous part in the discussions of Port-Royal as to subscription of the formulary: his opinion was decidedly in favor of resistance.
The number of good French authors, such as Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, and La Fontaine, who seemed to dispute it with the Augustan age, flourished under the despotism of Lewis XIV.; and the celebrated authors of the Augustan age did not shine till after the fetters were riveted upon the Roman people by that cruel and worthless Emperor.
Descartes, their philosopher, drew all his inferences from consciousness; Madame de Sevigne, the epistolary queen, had for her central motive of all speculation and gossip the love of her daughter; Madame Guyon eliminated her tenets from the ecstasy of self-love; Rochefoucauld derived a set of philosophical maxims from the lessons of mere worldly disappointment; Calvin sought to reform society through the stern bigotry of a private creed; La Bruyere elaborated generic characters from the acute, but narrow observation of artificial society; Boileau established a classical standard of criticism suggested by personal taste, which ignored the progress of the human mind.
In this situation I had strolled about for two or three days, considering what to do, but unable to come to any determination, when Providence directed me to the Temple Gardens. I threw myself on a seat, and, willing to forget my miseries for a moment, drew out a book; that book was a volume of Boileau.
He suffered tortures with the impatience of a man who has not been accustomed to resistances. On seeing Guenaud: "Ah!" said he; "now I am saved!" Guenaud was a very learned and circumspect man, who stood in no need of the critiques of Boileau to obtain a reputation. When facing a disease, if it were personified in a king, he treated the patient as a Turk treats a Moor.
This son, the object of so much care, to whom his father wrote such modest, grave, paternal, and sagacious letters, never wrote verses, lived in retirement, and died young without ever having married. Little Louis, or Lionval, Racine's last child, was the only one who ever dreamt of being a writer. "You must be very bold," said Boileau to him, "to dare write verses with the name you bear!
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