[292]. I am not aware of any History of the subject of this Book as a whole: nor even of any devoted to French seventeenth-century Criticism extensively but exclusively. The nearest thing to this latter is M. Bourgoin’s excellent Les Maîtres de la Critique au 17ème Siècle (Paris, 1889), giving studies of Malherbe, Chapelain, Saint-Evremond, Boileau, and La Bruyère. For the inevitable, though tedious, quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, H. Rigault’s book on the subject (Paris, 1859) is, and is likely to remain, a standard. Monographs are, of course, innumerable; and the very large proportionate space given in the usual French literary histories to this period, makes these specially pertinent. Two of the largest volumes of M. Petit de Julleville’s book, for instance—with ample bibliographies—contain the seventeenth century only.
[293]. Felt rather than acknowledged, it is true. We by no means uncommonly find hard words used of Scaliger, whose Homerophobia shocked orthodox French critics of this time more than his Virgiliomania conciliated them. Yet they owed him almost everything.
[294]. Enfin Malherbe vint. The edition in the Grands Ecrivains, by M. Ludovic Lalanne (5 vols., Paris, 1862-69), is not only by far the best, but in our case indispensable, as giving the full commentary on Desportes.
[295]. The Historiette of Tallemant (ed. Monmerqué, i. 236-278) is apparently based upon a fuller version of Racan, and must be compared.
[296]. In the Ninth Satire (v. infra). Regnier was Desportes’ nephew, and is said by the anecdotists (see last note) to have been incensed against Malherbe, not merely by the latter’s literary opposition to his uncle, but by a piece of gross rudeness of Malherbe’s to Desportes in the latter’s own house, where Regnier himself had introduced him.
[297]. The French critics, however, have perhaps taken too literally his reported blasphemy, that he did not value a good poet above a good player at ninepins. Malherbe was a Norman—that is to say, a parcel-Englishman—and may well have had something of that English humour of disparaging his own matters which is so incomprehensible to the French.
[298]. The version in Tallemant adds that he disliked Virgil. He also scoffed at the idea of “number” (rhythm) in prose.
[299]. Ed. Lalanne, iv. 249-473. There is an elaborate and standard monograph on this by M. Brunot, La Doctrine de Malherbe (Paris, 1891); but, as in other cases, I am obliged to postpone the comment to the text.
[300]. There are things of Castelvetro’s in the Opere Varie not wholly dissimilar; but these were then unpublished.
[301]. I have sometimes wondered whether the fact that, according to the Racan-Tallemant anecdote, Malherbe only “struck through” his copy of Ronsard without annotating it, is not an involuntary testimony to the Prince of Poets. Malherbe, for all his rancour and narrowness, was no fool; and he must in his mind have anticipated a famous later sentence about the eagle floating