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.