VOITURE, Vincent (1598-1648), the best writer of vers de société that France has yet produced, and one of the most influential preceptors of classical French prose, was born at Amiens in 1598. His father was a well-to-do wine merchant, who had connexions with the court, and it is one of the charges brought against Voiture that he was unnecessarily ashamed of his origin. At any rate he soon obtained a position in society, being appointed by Gaston d’Orléans to various offices in his household. Voiture had been well educated, and had profited both by his education and by the school friendships which it enabled him to make. He was early introduced to the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and travelled in the suite of Monsieur, or on missions, a good deal both in and out of France, on one occasion extending his journeyings as far as Ceuta, whence he wrote a letter of elaborate gallantry to Mademoiselle Paulet. Although a follower of Gaston, he made friends with Richelieu, and was one of the earliest Academicians. He also received appointments and pensions from Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria, and became altogether a very prosperous person. During his lifetime he, like most of the literary men of his time who were not cither dramatists or serious scholars, published nothing in book form, but his verses and his prose letters were the delight of the coteries, and were copied, handed about, and admired more perhaps than the work of any contemporary. This coterie success has, it would seem, done them more harm than good in the eyes of posterity. When the long and rather wearisome history of the quarrel between the Uranistes and the Jobelins (partisans of the respective merits of a sonnet of Voiture addressed to a certain Uranie and of another composed by his younger rival Benserade on ...