SAINT-AMANT, Marc Antoine Gerard, Sieur de (1594-1661), the most eminent of a curious bacchanalian school of poets in France during the 17th century, was born at Rouen in the year 1594. Very little is known of his family except that it was of some position at Rouen, and the mysterious description which all his French biographers give of his father—that he was a sailor “qui commanda pendant 22 ans un escadre de la reine Éliza-beth”—does not greatly assist an English imagination. It appears that Saint-Amant himself haunted taverns and other resorts of gay society a good deal during his youth and manhood, that he attached himself at different times to different great noblemen—Retz (the duke, not the cardinal), Créqui, Harcourt, &c.—that he saw some military service, and sojourned at different times in Italy, in England (a sojourn which provoked from him a violent poetical attack on the country, only printed within the last thirty years), in Poland (where he held a court appointment for two years), and elsewhere. But details on all these points are both few and vague. Saint-Amant’s later years were spent in France; and he died at Paris in 1661....