grandfather Claude collected a remarkable library (whence, at its
dispersion in the evil days of the house[143] during the eighteenth
century, came some of not the least precious possessions of French
public and private collections), his unfortunate brother Anne was a
poet. Honore himself, besides school exercises, wrote _Epistres Morales_
which were rather popular, and display qualities useful in appreciating
the novel itself; a poem in octosyllables, usually and perhaps naturally
called "_La_ Sireine," but really entitled in the masculine, and having
nothing to do with a mermaid; a curious thing, semi-dramatic in form and
in irregular blank verse, entitled _Silvanire ou La Morte Vive_, which
was rehandled soon after his death by Corneille's most dangerous rival
Mairet; and an epic called _La Savoisiade_, which seems to have no
merit, and all but a very small portion of which is still unprinted.

[Sidenote: Its character and appeals.]

He remains, therefore, the author of the _Astree_, and, taking things on
the whole (a mighty whole, beyond contest, as far as bulk goes), there
are not so many authors of the second rank (for one of the first he can
hardly be called) who would lose very much by an exchange with him.
One's estimates of the book are apt to vary in different places, even
as, though not in the same degree as, the estimates of others have
varied at different times; but I myself have found that the more I read
of it the more I liked and esteemed it; and I believe that, if I had a
copy of my own and could turn it over in the proper diurnal and
nocturnal fashion, not as duty- but as pleasure-reading, I should like
it better still. Certain points that have appealed to me have been
noticed already--its combination of sensuous and ideal passion is
perhaps the most important of them; but there are not a few others,
themselves by no means void of importance. One is the union, not common
in French books between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, of
sentiment and seriousness with something very like humour. Hylas, the
not exactly "comic man," but light-o'-love and inconstant shepherd, was
rather a bone of contention among critics of the book's own century. But
he certainly seasons it well; and there is one almost Shakespearean
scene in which he is concerned--a scene which Benedick and Beatrice, who
may have read it not so very many years after their own marriage, must
have enjoyed considerably. Hylas and the she