File:Portraits of the seventeenth century, historic and literary (1904) (14589614758).jpg

Identifier: portraitsofseven01sain (find matches)
Title: Portraits of the seventeenth century, historic and literary
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 1804-1869 Wormeley, Katharine Prescott
Subjects: French literature -- 17th century History and criticism Authors, French France -- Biography
Publisher: New York, London : G.P. Putnam's Sons
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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randeur of Louis XIV, seemto us in these days to restore to that memorable epocha character of grandeur and power, hitherto unsus-pected, and to rehabilitate it loftily in public opinion,along the very lines that destroy the notions of super-ficial admiration. There will come, I think, as greatvariation in our judgment of Louis XlVs epoch asthere has been in our ways of seeing and judging thethings of Greece and the Middle Ages. For instance,men studied little, or, at any rate, they little under-stood the Greek theatre; they admired it for qualitiesit did not have; then, casting a rapid glance upon itand perceiving that those qualities they consideredindispensable were often lacking to it, they treated itlightly,—witness Voltaire and La Harpe. Finally,studying it better, like M. Villemain, men began toadmire it precisely for not possessing those qualitiesof false nobleness and stilted dignity which theythought they saw in the first instance, and, later, weredisappointed not to find.
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LA FONTAINE.From a steel engraving. Xa jfontainc. i4S Opinions have followed the same course on theMiddle Ages, on chivalry, on the Gothic. To thegolden age of fancy succeeded sterner studies, whichcast some trouble into that first romantic region;then those studies, becoming stronger and more in-telligent, came at last to an age, not of gold but ofiron, yet marvellous still; an age of simple priests andmonks more powerful than kings, of mighty baronswhose enormous bones and gigantic armour frightenus; an art of granite and of stone, learned, delicate,aerial, majestic, mystical. In like manner the mon-archy of Louis XiV, admired at first for the ostenta-tious and apparent regularity and order that Voltaireextols, then revealed in its real infirmity by theMemoirs of Dangeau and the Princess Palatine, andbelittled intentionally by Lemontey, reappears to usin Saint-Simon vast, impeded, fluctuating, in a confu-sion that is not without grandeur and beauty; withthe running-gear of the old a

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