ergil, whom instructors call the Mantuan swan, perhaps
because he was not born in that city, he considered one of the most
terrible pedants ever produced by antiquity. Des Esseintes was
exasperated by his immaculate and bedizened shepherds, his Orpheus
whom he compares to a weeping nightingale, his Aristaeus who simpers
about bees, his Aeneas, that weak-willed, irresolute person who walks
with wooden gestures through the length of the poem. Des Esseintes
would gladly have accepted the tedious nonsense which those
marionettes exchange with each other off-stage; or even the poet's
impudent borrowings from Homer, Theocritus, Ennius and Lucretius; the
plain theft, revealed to us by Macrobius, of the second song of the
_Aeneid_, copied almost word for word from one of Pisander's poems; in
fine, all the unutterable emptiness of this heap of verses. The thing
he could not forgive, however, and which infuriated him most, was the
workmanship of the hexameters, beating like empty tin cans and
extending their syllabic quantities measured according to the
unchanging rule of a pedantic and dull prosody. He disliked the
texture of those stiff verses, in their official garb, their abject
reverence for grammar, their mechanical division by imperturbable
caesuras, always plugged at the end in the same way by the impact of a
dactyl against a spondee.

Borrowed from the perfected forge of Catullus, this unvarying
versification, lacking imagination, lacking pity, padded with useless
words and refuse, with pegs of identical and anticipated assonances,
this ceaseless wretchedness of Homeric epithet which designates
nothing whatever and permits nothing to be seen, all this impoverished
vocabulary of muffled, lifeless tones bored him beyond measure.

It is no more than just to add that, if his admiration for Vergil was
quite restrained, and his attraction for Ovid's lucid outpourings even
more circumspect, there was no limit to his disgust at the elephantine
graces of Horace, at the prattle of this hopeless lout who smirkingly
utters the broad, crude jests of an old clown.

Neither was he pleased, in prose, with the verbosities, the redundant
metaphors, the ludicrous digressions of Cicero. There was nothing to
beguile him in the boasting of his apostrophes, in the flow of his
patriotic nonsense, in the emphasis of his harangues, in the
ponderousness of his style, fleshy but ropy and lacking in marrow and
bone, in the insupportable dross of