Rhodius earlier and Nonnus later, to warn
us that, if we had more, we should find Homer not merely better, but
different, and this though probably every practitioner was at least
trying to imitate or surpass Homer. Dante stands in no class at all, nor
does Milton, nor does Shelley; and though Shakespeare indulgently
permits himself to be classed as an "Elizabethan dramatist," what
strikes true critics most is again hardly more his "betterness" than
his difference. The very astonishment with which we sometimes say of
Webster, Dekker, Middleton, that they come near Shakespeare, is not due,
as foolish people say, to any only less foolish idolatry, but to a true
critical surprise at the approximation of things usually so very
distinct.

The examples in higher forms of literature just chosen for comparison do
not, of course, show any wish in the chooser to even any French
seventeenth-century novelist with Homer or Shakespeare, with Dante or
Milton or Shelley. But the work noticed in the last chapter certainly
includes nothing of strong idiosyncrasy. In other books scattered, in
point of time of production, over great part of the period, such
idiosyncrasy is to be found, though in very various measure. Now,
idiosyncrasy is, if not the only difference or property, the inseparable
accident of all great literature, and it may exist where literature is
not exactly great. Moreover, like other abysses, it calls to, and calls
into existence, yet more abysses of its own kind or not-kind; while
school- and class-work, however good, can never produce anything but
more class- and school-work, except by exciting the always dubious and
sometimes very dangerous desire "to be different." The instances of this
idiosyncrasy with which we shall now deal are the _Francion_ of Charles
Sorel; the _Roman Comique_ of Paul Scarron; the _Roman Bourgeois_ of
Antoine Furetiere; the _Voyages_, as they are commonly called (though
the proper title is different[248]), _a la Lune et au Soleil_, of Cyrano
de Bergerac, and the _Princesse de Cleves_ of Mme. de La Fayette; while
last of all will come the remarkable figure of Anthony Hamilton, less
"single-speech"[249] than the others and than his namesake later, but
possessor of greater genius than any.

[Sidenote: Sorel and _Francion_.]

The present writer has long ago been found fault with for paying too
much attention to _Francion_, and he may possibly (if any one thinks it
worth while) be found fault wi