the story, and a remarkable undercurrent
of wit which is never obtrusive, as is sometimes the case in the verse
tales. Perrault's stories deserve their immense popularity, and they
found innumerable imitators chiefly among persons of quality, who, as M.
Honore Bonhomme, the best authority on the obscurer fairy-tale writers,
observes, probably found an attraction in the style because of the way
in which it lent itself to cover personal satire. This, however, is
something of an abuse, and little or nothing of it is discernible in
Perrault's own work, though later, and especially in the eighteenth
century, it was frequently if not invariably present.

NOTE TO THE LAST THREE CHAPTERS.

Although the list of names mentioned here under the respective heads of
poets, dramatists, and novelists is considerable, it is very far indeed
from being exhaustive. It may, indeed, be said generally that it is only
possible in this history, especially as we leave the invention of
printing farther and farther behind, to mention those names which have
left something like a memory behind them. The dramas and novels of the
seventeenth century are extremely numerous, and have been but very
partially explored. In regard to the poems there is an additional
difficulty. It was a fashion of the time to collect such things in
_recueils_--miscellaneous collections--in which the work of very large
numbers of writers, who never published their poems separately or
obtained after their own day any recognition as poets, is buried.
Specimens, published here and there by the laborious editors of the
greater classics in illustration of these latter, show that with
leisure, opportunity, and critical discernment, this little-worked vein
might be followed up not without advantage. But for such a purpose, as
for the similar exploration of many other out-of-the-way corners of this
vast literature, conditions are needed which are eminently 'the gift of
fortune.' These remarks apply more or less to all the following chapters
and books of this history. But they may find an appropriate place here,
not merely because it is from this period onwards that they are most
applicable, but because this special department of French literary
history--the earlier seventeenth century--contains, perhaps, the
greatest proportion of this wreckage of time as yet unrummaged and
unsorted by posterity.

FOOTNOTES:

[242] Not _du_ Tendre, as it is often erroneously cited in French a