Note 372 — Chapter I · FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU. (continued 2)
Reading edition
If I have seemed, or may seem, too bitter in any remarks on Boileau, let me here observe that few things in literary history are more pathetic than these last years of his, when, ultimus suorum, amid the ruins of the political glories which he had celebrated, and in a transition period between the great literature of the seventeenth century and that of the eighteenth, with no one but his foolish Boswell-Eckermann, Brossette, to comfort him, and no one at all to whom to look as his successor, he held—unconquered and unconquerable—to his principles, and died, as one of the poets to whom he was so unjust had said,
“Sans bouger, debout et dans son rang.”