Note 402 — Chapter I · FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU. (continued 2)

It can scarcely be necessary to give bricks of so large and rambling a house. “Mr Borrichius témoigne aussi que le style [of Ovid’s Heroides] est fort pur” is, and has to be, the kind of thing. Perhaps such a glut of authorities may have insensibly nauseated men of authority, and so Baillet may have worked both ways. He is good enough to admit (v. 461) that “one cannot say this nation [the English] is inferior even for Poetry to several others of the North,” and he has heard of “Abraham Cowley, John Downe ou Jean Donne, Cleveland, Edmond, [sic] Waller, Jean Denham, George Herbert, le Chancelier Bacon, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Beaumont, Ben, Johnson, Suckling, Jean Milton,” &c. It is open to Shaconians to contend that as the comma at “Edmond” is undoubtedly superfluous, so is that at “Bacon,” and that Baillet—the learned Baillet—meant to rank “le Chancelier Bacon-Shakespeare” among poets.