firmity of structure, condemning harshness of sound,
inversion, hiatus, negligence in accommodating the cesura to the
sense, the free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that
he rendered verse mechanical; but within the arrangement which he
prescribed, admirable effects were attainable by the mastery of
genius. He pondered every word, weighed every syllable, and thought
no pains ill-spent if only clearness, precision, the logic of
ordonnance, a sustained harmony were at length secured; and until
the day of his death, in 1628, no decline in his art can be perceived.

Malherbe fell far short of being a great poet, but in the history
of seventeenth-century classicism, in the effort of the age to
rationalise the forms of art, his name is of capital importance. It
cannot be said that he founded a school. His immediate disciples,
MAYNARD and RACAN, failed to develop the movement which he had
initiated. Maynard laid verse by the side of verse with exact care,
and sometimes one or the other verse is excellent, but he lacked
sustained force and flight. Racan had genuine inspiration; a true
feeling for nature appears in his dramatic pastoral, the _Bergeries_
(1625); unhappily he had neither the culture nor the patience needed
for perfect execution; he was rather an admirable amateur than an
artist. But if Malherbe founded no school, he gave an eminent example,
and the argument which he maintained in the cause of poetic art was
at a later time carried to its conclusion by Boileau.

Malherbe's reform was not accepted without opposition. While he
pleaded for the supremacy of order, regularity, law, the voice of
MATHURIN REGNIER (1573-1613) was heard on behalf of freedom. A nephew
of the poet Desportes, Regnier was loyal to his uncle's fame and to
the memory of the Pleiade; if Malherbe spoke slightingly of Desportes,
and cast aside the tradition of the school of Ronsard, the retort
was speedy and telling against the arrogant reformer, tyrant of words
and syllables, all whose achievement amounted to no more than _proser
de la rime et rimer de la prose_. Unawares, indeed, Regnier, to a
certain extent, co-operated with Malherbe, who recognised the genius
of his younger adversary; he turned away from languid elegances to
observation of life and truth of feeling; if he imitated his masters
Horace and Ovid, or the Italian satiric poets, with whose writings
he had become acquainted during two periods of residence in Rome,
his