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CHAPTER XI.
LETTERS ON THE ENGLISH.
The untiring and audacious pen of our author soon brought him into trouble which more than counterbalanced the popularity acquired through his tragedy. In his "Temple of Taste" (a satirical poem) he not only treated the most respected names in French literature—Racine, Corneille, Boileau—with a freedom of criticism which, however honest and fair, seemed to their admirers disrespectful, but dealt out to his contemporaries what he (but not they) considered justice. "The work," he says, "has roused up against me all those whom I have not praised sufficiently to their mind, and still more those whom I have not praised at all." The publication of the "Epistle to Uranie," written ten years before, and which, as has been said, he attempted to disown, inflamed yet more the animosity which raged against him. Yet he was at the same time engaged in adding to his "Letters on the English," then nearly ready for publication, an attack on the "Thoughts" of Pascal, which would be fuel to the fire. He had intrusted the work to a printer of Rouen for publication. But he long hesitated to publish it for fear of the consequences,
