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thers hailed him as master, and he enjoyed for the time an almost unexampled fame. To him were addressed the well known lines attributed to Charles IX.:
Tous deux également nous portons des couronnes:
Mais, roi, je la reçus: poète, tu la donnes.
His example must be reckoned high for his younger contemporaries beside the ancient writers to whom he pointed them.
But his authority was of short duration. RÉGNIER and D'AUBIGNÉ, who lived into the seventeenth century, could still be counted of his school. But they had already fallen upon times which began to be dissatisfied with the work of RONSARD and his disciples, to find their language crude and undigested, their grammar disordered, their expression too exuberant, lacking in dignity, sobriety, and reasonableness. There was a growing disposition to exalt the claims of regularity, order, and a recognized standard. A strict censorship was exercised over an author's vocabulary, grammar, and versification. Individual freedom was brought under the curb of rule. The man who voiced especially this growing temper of the times was MALHERBE (1555-1628). No doubt his service was great to French letters as a whole, since the movement that he stood for prepared those qualities which give French literature of the classic period its distinction. But these qualities are those of a highly objective and impersonal expression, seeking perfection in conformity to the general consensus of reasonable and intelligent minds, not of an intensely subjective expression, concerned in the first place with being true to the promptings of an individual temperament; and lyric expression is essentially of the latter kind. MALHERBE, therefore, in repressing the liberty of the individual temperament, sealed the springs of lyric poetry, which the Renaissance had opened, and they were not again set running till a new emancipation of the individual had come with the Revolution. Between MALHERBE and CHATEAUBRIAND, that is for almost two hundred