ere, however, Rousseau concerns us as a
direct pupil of Boileau, who, with great faculties for the formal part
of poetry, and not without some tincture of its spirit, set himself to
be a lyric poet after Boileau's fashion. He tried play-writing also, but
his dramas are quite unimportant. Rousseau's principal works are certain
odes, most of which are either panegyrical after the fashion of the
celebrated Namur specimen (though he is seldom so absurd as his master),
or else sacred and drawn from the Bible. The _Cantates_ are of the same
kind as the latter. These elaborate and formal works, which owed much of
their popularity to the vogue given to piety at court in the later years
of Louis XVI., are curiously contrasted with the third principal
division of his poems, consisting of epigrams which allow themselves the
full epigrammatic licence in subject and treatment. The contrast is,
however, probably due to a very simple cause, the state of demand at the
time, and perhaps also to the study of Marot, the only pre-seventeenth
century poet of France who was allowed to pass muster in the school of
Boileau. Rousseau's merits have been already indicated, and his defects
may be easily divined, even from this brief notice. He is almost always
adroit, often eloquent, sometimes remarkably clever; but he is seldom
other than artificial, never passionate, and only once or twice sublime.
Nor is it superfluous to mention that he is more responsible than any
other person for the intolerable frippery of classical mythology which
loads eighteenth-century verse.

La Motte-Houdart (1672-1731), a successful dramatist, an excellent
prose-writer, and an ingenious but paradoxical critic, was at the time
considered Rousseau's rival in point of ode-making. His work displays
the same defects in a greater and the same merits in a lesser degree,
but his fables in the style of La Fontaine are not unhappy.
Lagrange-Chancel, a partisan of the Duchess du Maine, is chiefly famous
for his ferocious satires on the Duke of Orleans. Louis Racine
(1692--1763), undeterred by his father's reputation and the dissuasion
of the redoubtable Boileau, attempted poetry of a serious kind. He was
brought up by the Jansenists, and his two chief works are poems on
'Grace' and 'Religion.' The latter is better than the former; but both
exhibit a considerable faculty in the style of verse which his father
had made fashionable. The 'Sacred Odes' of Louis Racine are, like most