Abel-François Villemain

[1] Villemain had the great advantage of coming just before the Romantic movement, of having a wide love of literature without being an extremist.

Most of the clever young men of the brilliant generation of 1830 passed under his influence; and, while he pleased the Romanticists by his frank appreciation of the beauties of English, German, Italian, and Spanish poetry, he did not decry the classics—either the classics proper of Greece and Rome or the so-called classics of France.

During the whole of the July Monarchy he was one of the chief dispensers of literary patronage in France, but in his later years his reputation declined.

Quot amicorum fugae!»"[citation needed] Villemain's chief work is his Cours de la littérature française (5 vols., 1828–1829).

[1] Lautréamont assessed him thus: "Villemain is thirty-four times more intelligent than Eugène Sue and Frédéric Soulié.