imitations were not obsequious, like those of the Pleiade, but
vigorous and original, like those of Boileau; in his sense of comedy
he anticipates some of Moliere's feeling for the humorous
perversities of human character; his language is vivid, plain, and
popular. The classical school of later years could not reject Regnier.
Boileau declared that no poet before Moliere was so well acquainted
with the manners and characters of men; through his impersonal study
of life he is indeed classic. But his ardent nature rebelled against
formal rule; he trusted to the native force of genius, and let his
ideas and passions lead him where they would. His satires are those
of a painter whose eye is on his object, and who handles his brush
with a vigorous discretion; they are criticisms of society and its
types of folly or of vice, full of force and colour, yet general in
their intention, for, except at the poet who had affronted his uncle,
"le bon Regnier" struck at no individual. Most admirable, amid much
that is admirable, is the picture of the old worldling Macette, whose
veil of pretended piety is gradually dropped as she discourses with
growing wantonness to the maiden whom she would lead in the way she
should not go: Macette is no unworthy elder of the family of Tartufe.
Regnier confesses freely the passions of his own irregular life; had
it been wisely conducted, his genius might have carried him far; as
it was, he passed away prematurely at the age of forty, the victim
of his own intemperate pursuit of pleasure.

Still more unfortunate was the life of a younger poet, who, while
honouring the genius of Malherbe, pronounced, like Regnier, for
freedom rather than order, and maintained that each writer of genius
should be a law to himself--a poet whom his contemporaries esteemed
too highly, and whom Malherbe, and afterwards Boileau, unjustly
depreciated--THEOPHILE DE VIAU. A Huguenot who had abjured his faith,
afterwards pursued as a libertine in conduct and as a freethinker,
Theophile was hunted, imprisoned, exiled, condemned to execution,
and died exhausted in 1626, when only six-and-thirty years old. He
has been described as the last lyrical poet of his age, and the first
of the poetical exponents of the new preciosity. His dramatic _Pyrame
et Thisbe_, though disfigured by those _concetti_ which the Italian
Marini--an honoured guest at the French court--and the invasion of
Spanish tastes had made the mode, is not without touc