Note 331 — Chapter I · FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU.

Scudéry thinks Four things necessary to Epic—the authority of History, the observance of received Religion, the exercise of Poetic Licence in Fiction, and the provision of Great Events. He is not uninteresting for his connection with his sister’s prose Romances in which he had some, if not much, share, and which he never forgets. Also, he clings to the Pléiade technicalities to some extent—kindly, however, explaining such words as Hune, Quille (which, he says rather quaintly, is un bois courbé qui est au plus bas d’un vaisseau), and Calfater. The Ibrahim preface, thirteen years earlier, exhibits the same obliging explanation of technicalities, and the same virtuous adherence to The Rules. “Provided,” he says, “that an Architect takes his measures right, he is assured of the beauty of his building,” which would seem to dissuade any one from advancing beyond the packing-case style of architecture. And he is sure that a Romance, like an Epic, should never go beyond one year in time.