“Si la foi plus certaine en une âme non feinte”—
n’en, nu, n’a;
and, still more in the style of the two later jokes—
“Mais vous, belle tyranne, aux Nérons comparable”—
Tira nos nez!
Indeed, he never loses an opportunity of blackmarking this collocation of letters in different words, a point to which the later Latin rhetoricians had perhaps made the French specially attentive, but notice of which, except in the rarest cases, would be thought unworthy of anybody but a schoolboy (or a comic journalist of not the highest class) in England.
It was perhaps a little dangerous for Malherbe to be so prodigal of the words “pedantry” and “stupidity” as he is; while time and use have sometimes made his peremptory judgments look rather foolish. For instance, Desportes had used poumons in the plural, as we have practically always used “lungs” in English. “On ne dit,” says our usher, with an almost audible bang of the ferule on the desk,—“On ne dit point qu’un homme ait des poumons: et ne m’allègue pas qu’il y a plusieurs lobes au poumon, car tu serais un sot.” Poor posterity! It has been (in France) tolerably docile to Malherbe, but it has in this respect undoubtedly written itself down an ass—or perhaps him. For no Frenchman now would hesitate to use the word in the plural. He is constantly objecting to consommer in the sense of consumer; he ejaculates (with the sort of indignant bark which we hear so often from him and from critics of his kind) on
“Et pensant de mes faits l'étrange frénésie”
“Je ne sais si c’est allemand ou anglais: mais je sais bien que ce n’est pas français”; stigmatises (surely with injustice?) trop injuste Amour as a mauvais vocatif, and shows his own want of poetic imagination and poetic sympathy by scouting as bad the beautiful epithet amoureuse in
“Enflammant l’air d’amoureuse clarté,”