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22  ANNUAL REGISTER FOR the YEAR 1772. 23

you will ask? Yes of the fame, of Theodas, and of him alone. He shrieks, he jumps, he rolls upon the ground, he roars, he storms ; and in the midst of this tempest, a flame issues that shines, that rejoices ; without a figure he rattles like a fool, and thinks like a wife man ; he utters truths in a ridiculous way, and in an ideotic manner rational and sensible things. It is astonishing to find good sense disclose itself from the bosom of buffoonery, accompanied with grimaces and contortions. What shall I fay more? He does and he says better than he knows.  These are like two fouls that are unacquainted with each other, which have each their turn and separate functions. A feature would be wanting in this extraordinary portrait, if I omitted saying, that he has, at once, an insatiable thrift for praise, ready to throw himself at the mercy of the critics, and at the bottom so docile, as to profit by their censure.  I begin to persaude myself, that I have been drawing portraits of two different persons ; it would not be impossible to find a third in Theodas; for he is a good man, a pleasant man, an excellent man."
To Santeuil we are indebted for many fine church hymns. Santeuil read the verses he made for the inhabitants of heaven, with all the agitations of a demonic. Despreaux said he was the devil whom God compelled to praise faints. He was among the number of poets, whose genius was as impetuous as their muse decent.
Santeuil, before he engaged in singing the mysteries of christianity, and the praises of the faints, had celebrated the glory of several great men, and enriched the city of Paris with many agreeable and ingenious inscriptions.  It was the great Bossuet who engaged Santeuil to quit the profane muses, to consecrate him to religious poems.  Nevertheless, when La Quintinie gave his instructions upon gardening, Santeuil could not refrain ornamenting it with a poem, in which the divinities of paganism performed the principal parts. Bossuet, to whom he had promised never more to introduce the fabulous gods, considered him as perjured. Santeuil, conscious of the reproach, excused himself in a poetical piece, at the head of which was a plate, in which he was represented upon his knees, a rope around his neck, and a flambeau in his hand, walking from the church of Meaux, in the attitude of a man making a kind of honorable amende.
This poem satisfied the great Bossuet. The poet had more difficulty in appeasing the jesuits, who could not pardon him for the epitaph he had written for the great Arnaud. In vain did he address a letter to father Jouvenci, in which he lavished the greatest encomiums upon society.  As he did not retract those he had bestowed upon the declared foe of the fame society, the jesuits were but little satisfied with it; and this step only served to testify the unsteadiness and levity of the poet. Father Commire wrote his Linguarium upon this occasion; and an enemy to the jesuits, spared him as little, in a piece called, Santolius penitens ; and the poet of St Victor, found that, by endeavoring to keep in with both parties, he equally displeafed them. Santeuil received some consolation admidst those attacks, in the commerce of the literary and great world.
Many anecdotes have appeared of this great man, some of which we shall lay before our readers.
Santeuil one day composed some verses for a scholar, who asking to whom he was indebted for the obligation, the poet replied, "If you are asked who made these, you need only reply, it was the devil."  The subject of the scholar's poem was, "A youth in a fit of passion, took up a knife and cut his younger brother's throat; the mother in a rage, threw the culprit into a copper of boiling water; distracted at what she had done, she hung herself, and the father was shocked at the horrid spectacle." The point was to reduce these accidents into a short compass, and Santeuil rendered them thus,
"Alter cum puero mater 
"conjuncta marito
"Cutello, limpha, fune, dolore
"cadunt."
Though Santeuil was often pressed to qualify himself for priest's orders, he never was but in deacon's. This did not, however, prevent his preaching in a village, on a day that the preist could not be found. Scarce had he mounted the pulpit, before he forgot himself, and was consused: he retired, saying, "I had a great many more things to fay to you; but it is needless to preach any more; you would not be the better for it."
A preist of St. Victor shewed Santeuil some verses, in which was the word quoniam, which is an expression entirely prosaic. Santteuil, in order to rally him, repeated a whole psalm, in which the word quoniam occurred twenty times. "Consitemini domino quoniam bonus; quoniam misercordia ejus; quoniam salutare tuum, &c." The priest, piqued at this immediately replied in the words of Virgil, 
"Insanire libet quoniam tibi."
Santeuil said, that though there was no salvation out of the church for any one, he was an exception to the rule, as he was obliged to withdraw from it to work his own, as whilst he staid there, he could not help listening with too much self-applause to his own hymns.
Being at Port-Royal, where his hymns were singing, a peasant by the fide of him bellowed out in such an outrageous manner, that the poet could refrain saying,
"Be silent, thou brute, and let those angels sing."
Whenever he took an enmity to any one, he never could be afterwards reconciled to him.  He was one day talking to the Duchess Dumaine, of the bad conduct of a prior of the abbey of St. Victor; and as he began to be quite out of temper upon the occasion, the duchess, who imagined he was talking so the prior when living, said Santeuil was quite in the right, and that he should be turned out. "Heaven has fettled this matter, (said he) for he has been dead these hundred years."
He was prevailed upon, by a friend, to be a spectator at a private dramatic representation.  The piece was far advanced, when he jumped up in the middle of an interesting scene, and violently clapped his hands, crying, "What an amazing fool I am?" "What is the
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Transcription Notes:
Note to the reviewer: There are many instances where the letter s is replaced by an f in the text causing it to look like a misspelling. ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-05-21 19:41:47 Change what may appear to be an "f" to an "s" where appropriate. This is a different style of print and cursive, not a different way of spelling words. I confirmed this with SI TC Staff on 5-19-23. --Jlch ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-05-22 06:41:55