Dante, the celebrated Italian poet, has been described by Boccacio, as of a middle stature, of a pensive and melancholy expression in his countenance.  He was courteous and civil, and his way of living extremely temperate.  He is said to have been a very absent man, of which instances have been recorded; once meeting with a book in an apothecary’s, which he had been long looking for, he opened it, and read from morning till night without being roused from his pursuit by the distraction and tumult occasioned by a great wedding passing through the street.  For some time he roved about Italy in an indigent and distressed condition, till he was hospitably received by the Lord of Ravenna, his patron and friend.

Paul Scarron, whose life abounds with curious features, married Mademoiselle d’Aubigne, afterwards the celebrated Madame de Maintenon, who was at that time only sixteen years of age.  On his marriage, the notary asked him what dowry he would settle upon his wife? he replied, “Immortality:  the names of the wives of kings die with them, but the name of Scarron’s wife shall live for ever.”  He was accustomed to talk to his superiors with great freedom, and in a very jocular style.  In a dedication to the king, he thus addressed his majesty:  “I shall endeavour to persuade your majesty, that you would do yourself no injury, were you to do me a small favour; for in that case I should become gay.  If I should become more gay, I should write sprightly comedies; and if I should write sprightly comedies, your majesty would be amused, and thus your money would not be lost.  All this appears so evident that I should certainly be convinced of it, if I were as great a king as I am now a poor unfortunate man.”  Scarron took pleasure in reading his works to his friends, as he composed them; he used to call it trying them.  Segrais and another person coming to him one day, “Take a chair,” he said, “and sit down, that I may examine my Comic Romance.”  When he saw them laugh very heartily, he said he was satisfied, “my book will be well received since it makes persons of such delicate taste laugh.”  He was not disappointed in his expectations, for the Romance had a great run.  In the year 1638, he was attending the Carnival at Mons, of which he was a canon.  Having put on the dress of a savage, he was followed by a troop of boys into a morass, where he was kept so long, that the cold penetrated his debilitated limbs, which became contracted in such a manner, that he used to compare his body to the shape of a Z. He died in 1660, at the age of fifty; he said to his friends who surrounded his dying bed, “I shall never make you weep so much as I have made you laugh.”  In his epitaph, made by himself, he desires, in a mixture of the comic and the pathetic, that the passengers would not awaken, by their noise, poor Scarron from the first good sleep he had ever enjoyed.

P.T.W.

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THE SELECTOR; AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS.