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Updated: September 19, 2025
The "Voeu de Louis XIII," the "Thetis" of Ingres, we may compare to Voltaire's Henriade and to the Franciade of Ronsard, all belong to the category of the opus magnum that has failed, and of which its creator is proud." With the following charming simile the essay closes
The poem was called "Henriade," and was regarded with admiration by his contemporaries. Arouet was finally set free, his innocence being satisfactorily proved. He now issued the tragedy of "Oedipus," which had a great success. This success was only deserved in part.
In his OEdipus he had assaulted priestcraft with not undeserved severity; we must always remember what he saw around him. In his Henriade , perhaps almost unintentionally, he had glorified Henry IV at the expense of the Great Monarch. After his stay in England we have his Brutus , an attack on kingcraft, and his Zaïre , a Parisian Othello, both based on Shakespeare.
It is in the main a play belonging to the same order as King Henry IV.; but it differs from our English Henriade as remarkably unlike Voltaire's as Zaire is unlike Othello not more by the absence of Falstaff than by the presence of Brutus.
Secretary to the British Herring Fishery, remarkable for an extraordinary number of occasional verses, not of eminent merit. BOSWELL. See ante, i. 115, note i. Lockman was known in France as the translator of Voltaire's La Henriade. See Marmontel's Preface. Voltaire's Works, ed. 1819, viii. 18. Luke vii. 50.
Tacitus, 2 vols. Titus Livy, Thucydides, 2 vols. Vertot, 4 vols. Denina, 8 vols. Frederick II, 8 vols. POETRY. Osaian, 1 vol. Tasso, 6 vols. Ariosto, 6 vols. Homer, 6 vols. Virgil, 4 vols. The Henriade, 1 vol. Telemachus, 2 vols. Les Jardin, 1 vol. The Chefs-d'Oeuvre of the French Theatre, 20 vols. Select Light Poetry, 10 vols. La Fontaine. ROMANCE. Voltaire, 4 vols. Heloise, 4 vols.
First, his education under the Jesuits, which gave him an insight into their system; secondly, his introduction to the irreligious and immoral society of the fashionable abbes of the day, which showed him another side of the official religion of the time; thirdly, the beneficent friendship of the Abbé de Caumartin, who set him thinking about great and ambitious subjects, and led him to write the Henriade, and probably also to begin projecting his Siècle de Louis XIV; fourthly, the enforced leisure of the Bastille, whither he went a second time in 1726 for having resented an insult put on him by a coarse nobleman, one of the Rohans; lastly thanks to the order for his exile his sojourn in England after release from the Bastille, and his friendship for the chief writers and thinkers of this country.
But how torturing it was to road, to listen to these pathetic and measured Alexandrines from the "Henriade," while perchance in this same hour a new Alexander was placing the crown upon his young and noble head! In fact, but little was heard of these harmonious verses. All looked stealthily toward the window, and listened breathlessly to every sound that came from the road.
What he did not find there was the natural prerogative such justification, in kingly, that is to say, in exceptional, qualities, of the exceptional position, as makes it practicable in the result. It is no Henriade he writes, and no history of the English people, but the sad fortunes of some English kings as conspicuous examples of the ordinary human condition.
He shewed me a bundle of manuscript, which I found to be an excellent translation of Voltaire's "Henriade" into Italian verse. Tasso himself could not have done it better. He said he hoped to finish the poem at Florence, and to present it to the grand duke, who would be sure to make him a magnificent present, and to constitute him his favourite.
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