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'I have read since last October a good deal of the history relating to the East...: not much of books not connected with India [but included] ...; all Boileau's "Satires", and a good number of his "Epistles", and "Mithridate". ...'
Mary Russell Mitford to Elizabeth Barrett, 1 February 1838: 'I have just been reading Racine's "Letters," and Boileau's. How much one should like both, if it were not for their slavish servile devotion to the king (and I think it was real), and to that odious woman Madame de Maintenon.'
Texts on which detailed notes made in E. M. Forster, Commonplace Book (1930) include Boileau, L'Art Poetique, comments on which include: 'He realises that experience is valuable to a writer and that the heart of the reader must be touched: but his conceptions of experience and the heart are jejune.'