Excerpt from The Complete Works of Theophile Gautier, Vol. 2 But if Gautier could not and did not seek to wholly reverse the judgments of Boileau, he succeeded in making the readers of his own and of succeeding generations appreciate in these minor poets many a forgotten beauty, and in giving such vivid reproduc tions of the men and their times that every one, Cyrano de Bergerac, saint-amant, Scarron, and the others actually live in his pages. He has written criticisms keen, bright, interesting; full of brilliant passages, of evocations of bygone times, of restoration of forgotten modes of thought; he has made intel ligible the fame which most of these men enjoyed in their day, -and all this without once wearying the reader, but, on the contrary, maintaining his interest and exciting his curiosity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.