Note 419 — CANTO THE FOURTH[375]
Reading edition
[Hobhouse, in his note x., quotes Boileau, but not in full. The passage runs thus—
"Tous les jours, à la cour, un sot de qualité Peut juger de travers avec impunité, A Malherbe, à Racan, préfère Théophile, Et le clinquant du Tasse à tout l'or de Virgile."
Perhaps he divined that the phrase, "un sot de qualité," might glance back on a "noble author," who was about to admit that he could not savour Horace, and who turned aside from Mantua and memories of Virgil to visit Ferrara and the "cell" where Tasso was "encaged." (See Darmesteter's Notes to Childe Harold, pp. 201, 217.)
If "the Youth with brow serene," as Hugo calls him, had lived to read Dédain. A Lord Byron, en 1811, he would have passed a somewhat different criticism on French poetry in general—
"En vain vos légions l'environnent sans nombre, Il n'a qu'à se lever pour couvrir de son ombre A la fois tous vos fronts; Il n'a qu'à dire un mot pour couvrir vos voix grèles, Comme un char en passant couvre le bruit des ailes De mille moucherons!"
Les Feuilles d'Automne, par Victor Hugo, Bruxelles, 1833, pp. 59, 63.]