Note 185 — BOOK VII[145]
Alexander Teixeira de Mattos translation
Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544-1590), author of, among other poems, the Semaine, ou La Création en sept journées, which was published in 1579 and passed through thirty editions in a few years. Writing of Du Bartas, Professor Saintsbury, in his Short History of French Literature and French Lyrics, says:
"All that was wanting to make Du Bartas a poet of the first rank was some faculty of self-criticism; of natural verve and imagination as well as of erudition he had no lack, but in critical faculty he seems to have been totally deficient. His beauties, rare in kind and not small in amount, are alloyed with vast quantities of dull absurdity."
Du Bartas' fellow-countrymen entertain a similar view, and Bouillet, in his Dictionnaire universel d'histoire et de géographie, expresses himself in almost the same words when he writes that "ce poète avait de la verve et de l'imagination, mais manquait de goût."—T.