George Saintsbury

“ They have not much poetical merit, but they exhibit something of the smoothness of versification not uncommon in those who write, with care, a language not their own. The ingenuity of a single English critic has striven to attribute to him a curious book in prose, called Le Débat des hérauts de France et d’Angleterre, but Paul Meyer, in his edition of the book in question, has completely disposed of this theory. For all practical purposes, therefore, Charles’s work consists of some hundreds of short French poems, a few in various metres, but the majority either ballades or rondels. ”

“ But he is more than this; in a certain easy grace and truth of expression, as well as in a peculiar mixture of melancholy, which is not incompatible with the enjoyment of the pleasures, even the trifling pleasures, of life, with listlessness that is fully able to occupy itself about those trifles, he stands quite alone. He has the urbanity of the 18th century without its vicious and prosaic frivolity, the poetry of the middle ages without their tendency to tediousness. ”

“ The chronology of these poems is not always clear, still less the identity of the persons to whom they are addressed, and it is certain that some, perhaps the greater part of them, belong to the later years of the poet’s life. But many are expressly stated in the manuscripts to have been “composed in prison,” others are obviously so composed, and, on the whole, there is in them a remarkable unity of literary flavour. Charles d’Orléans is not distinguished by any extraordinary strength of passion or originality of character ”