n the universe." "Remember," Louis XIV. had said,
"that I have always an hour a week to give you when you like to come."
Boileau did not go again. "What should I go to court for?" he would say;
"I cannot sing praises any more."

At Racine's death Boileau did not write any longer. He had entered the
arena of letters at three and twenty, after a sickly and melancholy
childhood. The _Art Poetique_ and the _Lutrin_ appeared in 1674; the
first nine _Satires_ and several of the _Epistles_ had preceded them.
Rather a witty, shrewd, and able versifier than a great poet, Boileau
displayed in the _Lutrin_ a richness and suppleness of fancy which his
other works had not foreshadowed. The broad and cynical buffoonery of
Scarron's burlesques had always shocked his severe and pure taste. "Your
father was weak enough to read _Virgile travesti,_ and laugh over it," he
would, say to Louis Racine, "but he kept it dark from me." In the
_Lutrin,_ Boileau sought the gay and the laughable under noble and
polished forms; the gay lost by it, the laughable remained stamped with
an ineffaceable seal. "M. Despreaux," wrote Racine to his son, "has not
only received from heaven a marvellous genius for satire, but he has
also, together with that, an excellent judgment, which makes him discern
what needs praise and what needs blame." This marvellous genius for
satire did not spoil Boileau's natural good feeling. "He is cruel in
verse only," Madame de Sevigne used to say. Racine was tart, bitter in
discussion; Boileau always preserved his coolness: his judgments
frequently anticipated those of posterity. The king asked him one day
who was the greatest poet of his reign. "Moliere, sir," answered
Boileau, without hesitation. "I shouldn't have thought it, rejoined the
king, somewhat astonished; "but you know more about it than I do."
Moliere, in his turn, defending La Fontaine against the pleasantries of
his friends, said to his neighbor at one of those social meals in which
the illustrious friends delighted, " Let us not laugh at the good soul
(bonhomme) he will probably live longer than the whole of us." In the
noble and touching brotherhood of these great minds, Boileau continued
invariably to be the bond between the rivals; intimate friend as he was
of Racine, he never quarrelled with Moliere, and he hurried to the king
to beg that he would pass on the pension with which he honored him to the
aged Corneille, groundlessly deprived of the