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Updated: June 13, 2025
"Really," they said among themselves, "Astolphe is a well of learning." The interesting fact circulated all over the town, and sustained the general belief in M. de Saintot's abilities. After this pair came M. de Bartas, known as Adrien among the circle. It was M. de Bartas who boomed out his song in a bass voice, and made prodigious claims to musical knowledge.
His prefaces are a complete log of his life, and the habit of writing them was a useful one to him, for it forced him to think with a pen in his hand, which, according to Goethe, "if it do no other good, keeps the mind from staggering about." In these prefaces we see his taste gradually rising from Du Bartas to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, from Corneille to Shakespeare.
But before she or he could speak again, the door of the library was thrown open. "Good Heavens!" said Montresor, springing to his feet. "Lady Henry!" M. du Bartas lifted astonished eyes. On the threshold of the room stood an old lady, leaning heavily on two sticks. She was deathly pale, and her fierce eyes blazed upon the scene before her.
Milton, without being a very wide reader, was likely to have seen the Adamus Exul of Grotius , and he certainly had read Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victory and Triumph . There are traces of verbal reminiscence of Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas.
M. Alexandre de Brebian performed heroic exploits in sepia; he disfigured the walls of his friends' rooms with a swarm of crude productions, and spoiled all the albums in the department. M. Alexandre de Brebian and M. de Bartas came together, each with his friend's wife on his arm, a cross-cornered arrangement which gossip declared to be carried out to the fullest extent.
And even in these school exercises we think we can discern that the future poet was already a diligent reader of Sylvester's Du Bartas , the patriarch of Protestant poetry, and of Fairfax's Tasso . There are other indications that, from very early years, poetry had assumed a place in Milton's mind, not merely as a juvenile pastime, but as an occupation of serious import.
As Montresor spoke, however, she came forward, and in a French which was a joy to the ear, she presented M. du Bartas, a tall, well-built Norman with a fair mustache, first to the Duchess and then to Lord Lackington and Jacob. "The director of the French Foreign Office," said Montresor, in an aside to the Duchess. "He hates us like poison.
When 'fancy' was spelt 'phant'sy, as by Sylvester in his translation of Du Bartas, and other scholarly writers of the seventeenth century, no one could doubt of its identity with 'phantasy, as no Greek scholar could miss its relation with phantasia. Spell 'analyse' as I have sometimes seen it, and as phonetically it ought to be, 'annalize, and the tap-root of the word is cut.
That Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas was not well done, and that he wrote his verses before he understood to confer; and those of Fairfax were not good. That the translations of Homer and Virgil in long Alexandrines were but prose. That Sir John Harrington's Ariosto of all translations was the worst.
"M. du Bartas, I am charmed to make your acquaintance. With your leave, I will pursue it when I am better able to profit by it. To-morrow I will write to you to propose another meeting should my health allow." "Enchanté, madame," murmured the Frenchman, more embarrassed than he had ever been in his life. "Permettez moi de vous faire mes plus sincères excuses."
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