I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the onslaught on your ‘Pucelle.’  These qualities, alas! are not strange to literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us ‘potter hates potter, and poet hates poet’?  But contemporary spites do not harm true genius.  Who suffered more than Molie’re from cabals?  Yet neither the court nor the town ever deserted him, and he is still the joy of the world.  I admit that his adversaries were weaker than yours.  What were Boursault and Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and De Vise’, what were they all compared to your enemy, Boileau?  Brossette tells a story which really makes a man pity you.  There was a M. de Puimorin who, to be in the fashion, laughed at your once popular Epic.  ’It is all very well for a man to laugh who cannot even read.’  Whereon m. de Puimorin replied:  ’Qu’il n’avoit que trop su’ lire, depuis que Chapelain s’e’toit avise’ de faire imprimer.’  A new horror had been added to the accomplishment of reading since Chapelain had published.  This repartee was applauded, and M. de Puimorin tried to turn it into an epigram.  He did complete the last couplet,
  He’las! pour mes pe’che’s, je n’ai su’ que trop lire
 Depuis que tu fais imprimer.

But by no labour would M. de Puimorin achieve the first two lines of his epigram.  Then you remember what great allies came to his assistance.  I almost blush to think that M. Despre’aux, M. Racine, and M. de Molie’re, the three most renowned wits of the time, conspired to complete the poor jest, and madden you.  Well, bubble as your poetry was, you may be proud that it needed all these sharpest of pens to prick the bubble.  Other poets, as popular as you, have been annihilated by an article.  Macaulay puts forth his hand, and ‘Satan Montgomery’ was no more.  It did not need a Macaulay, the laughter of a mob of little critics was enough to blow into space; but you probably have met Montgomery, and of contemporary failures or successes I do not speak.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus of criticism ever made you doubt for a moment whether, after all, you were not a false child of Apollo?  Was your complacency tortured, as the complacency of true poets has occasionally been, by doubts?  Did you expect posterity to reverse the verdict of the satirists, and to do you justice?  You answered your earliest assailant, Linie’re, and, by a few changes of words, turned his epigrams into flattery.  But I fancy, on the whole, you remained calm, unmoved, wrapped up in admiration of yourself.  According to M. de Marivaux, who reviewed, as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty dead, you ’conceived, on the strength of your reputation, a great and serious veneration for yourself and your genius.’  Probably you were protected by this invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, probably you declared that mere jealousy dictates the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain’s real fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary success, Qu’il soit le mieux rente’ de tous les beaux-esprits.