BOILEAU-DESPREAUX, NICOL AS 711), French poet and critic, was born in the rue de Jerusalem, Paris, the 5th child of Gilles Boileau, a clerk in the parlement. Two of his brothers attained distinction: Gilles Boileau (1631-1669), who is the author of a translation of Epictetus; and Jacques Boileau, who became a canon of the Sainte Chapelle, and made valuable contributions to church history. His mother died when he was two years old; and Nicolas Boileau, who had a delicate constitution, seems to have suffered something from want of care. Sainte-Beuve puts down his somewhat hard and unsympathetic outlook quite as much to the uninspiring circumstances of these days as to the general character of his time. He studied at the College de Beauvais, and at the Sorbonne, and was called to the bar Dec. 4, 1656, but from 1657 onwards he devoted himself to letters.
The first piece in which his peculiar powers were displayed was the first satire (166o), in imitation of the third satire of Juvenal; it embodied the fareyvell of a poet to the city of Paris. This was quickly followed by eight others, and the number was at a later period increased to twelve. A twofold interest attaches to the satires. In the first place the author skilfully parodies and at tacks writers who at the time were placed in the very first rank, such as Jean Chapelain, the abbe Charles Cotin, Philippe Quinault and Georges de Scudery. In the second place he showed both by precept and practice what were the poetical capabilities of French verse. His admiration for Moliere found expression in the stanzas addressed to him (1663), and in the second satire (1664). In 1664 he composed his prose Dialogue des heros de roman, a satire on the elaborate romances of the time, which may be said to have once for all abolished the lucubrations of La Calprenede, Mlle. de Scudery and their fellows. Though fairly widely read in manuscript, the book was not publiihed till 1713, out of regard, it is said, for Mlle. de Scudery. To these early days belong the reunions at the Mouton Blanc and the Pomme du Pin, where Boileau, Moliere, Racine, Chapelle and Antoine Furetiere met to discuss literary questions.
On English literature the maxims of Boileau, through the trans lation revised by Dryden, and through the magnificent imitation of them in Pope's Essay on Criticism, have exercised no slight influence. Boileau does not merely lay down rules for the lan guage of poetry, but analyses carefully the various kinds of verse composition, and enunciates the principles peculiar to each. Of the four books of L'Art poetique, the first and last consist of general precepts, inculcating mainly the great rule of bon seas; the second treats of the pastoral, the elegy, the ode, the epigram and satire; and the third of tragic and epic poetry. The Lutrin, a mock heroic poem, of which four cantos appeared in fur nished Alexander Pope with a model for the Rape of the Lock, but the English poem is superior in richness of imagination and subtlety of invention. The fifth and sixth cantos, afterwards added by Boileau, rather detract from the beauty of the poem; the last canto in particular is quite unworthy of his genius. In 1674 appeared also his translation of Longinus On the Sublime.
Boileau was made historiographer to the king in 1677. From this time the amount of his production diminished. The satires had raised up a crowd of enemies against him. The Toth satire, on women, provoked an Apologie des femmes from Charles Per rault. Antoine Arnauld in the year of his death wrote a letter in defence of Boileau, but when, at the desire of his friends, he submitted his reply to Bossuet, the bishop pronounced all satire to be incompatible with the spirit of Christianity, and the loth satire to be subversive of morality. The friends of Arnauld had declared that it was inconsistent with the dignity of a churchman to write on any subject so trivial as poetry. The epistle, Sur l'amour de Diets, was a triumphant vindication on the part of Boileau of the dignity of his art. He was admitted to the Acad emy in 1684, and then only by the king's wish. In 1687 he retired to a country-house he had bought at Auteuil, which Racine, be cause of the numerous guests, called his hotellerie d'Auteuil. In 1705 he sold his house and returned to Paris, where he lived with his confessor in the cloisters of Notre Dame. In the 12th satire, Sur l'equivoque, he attacked the Jesuits in verses which Sainte Beuve called a recapitulation of the Lettres provinciales of Pascal. This was written about 1705. He then gave his attention to the arrangement of a complete and definitive edition of his works. But the Jesuit fathers obtained from Louis XIV. the withdrawal of the privilege already granted for the publication, and demanded the suppression of the 12th satire. These annoyances are said to have hastened his death.
See also Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. vi. ; F. Brunetiere, "L'Esthetique de Boileau" (Revue des Deux Mondes, June 1889), and an exhaustive article by the same critic in La Grande encyclopedie; G. Lanson, Boileau (1892), in the series of Grands ecrivains f rancais; A. Bellessort, Sur les grands Chemins de la poesie classique ... Boileau (1914) ; A. F. B. Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England, 166o-1830 (1925).