poor writer indeed, but the frankness and intrepidity of
his character enable him, while he is painting himself, to paint man.
Gibbon was struck by the honesty of his pen, for he says in his life,
"The dulness of Michael de Marolles and Anthony Wood[351] acquires some
value from the faithful representation of men and manners."

I have elsewhere shortly noticed the Abbe de Marolles in the character
of "a literary sinner;" but the extent of his sins never struck me so
forcibly as when I observed his delinquencies counted up in
chronological order in Niceron's "Hommes Illustres." It is extremely
amusing to detect the swarming fecundity of his pen; from year to year,
with author after author, was this translator wearying others, but
remained himself unwearied. Sometimes two or three classical victims in
a season were dragged into his slaughter-house. Of about seventy works,
fifty were versions of the classical writers of antiquity, accompanied
with notes. But some odd circumstances happened to our extraordinary
translator in the course of his life. De l'Etang, a critic of that day,
in his "Regles de bien traduire," drew all his examples of bad
translation from our abbe, who was more angry than usual, and among his
circle the cries of our Marsyas resounded. De l'Etang, who had done this
not out of malice, but from urgent necessity to illustrate his
principles, seemed very sorry, and was desirous of appeasing the angried
translator. One day in Easter, finding the abbe in church at prayers,
the critic fell on his knees by the side of the translator: it was an
extraordinary moment, and a singular situation to terminate a literary
quarrel. "You are angry with me," said De l'Etang, "and I think you have
reason; but this is a season of mercy, and I now ask your pardon."--"In
the manner," replied the abbe, "which you have chosen, I can no longer
defend myself. Go, sir! I pardon you." Some days after, the abbe again
meeting De l'Etang, reproached him with duping him out of a pardon,
which he had no desire to have bestowed on him. The last reply of the
critic was caustic: "Do not be so difficult; when one stands in need of
a general pardon, one ought surely to grant a particular one." De
Marolles was subject to encounter critics who were never so kind as to
kneel by him on an Easter Sunday. Besides these fifty translations, of
which the notes are often curious, and even the sense may be useful to
consult, his love of writing produced