agent, holding strange elements in solution, incurred their censure for
bringing Saint Peter and the sea-nymphs into dangerous juxtaposition in
"Lycidas."

But by the middle of the seventeenth century the renaissance schools of
poetry had become effete in all European countries. They had run into
extravagances of style, into a vicious manner known in Spain as
Gongorism, in Italy as Marinism, and in England best exhibited in the
verse of Donne and Cowley and the rest of the group whom Dr. Johnson
called the metaphysical poets, and whose Gothicism of taste Addison
ridiculed in his _Spectator_ papers on true and false wit. It was France
that led the reform against this fashion. Malherbe and Boileau insisted
upon the need of discarding tawdry ornaments of style and cultivating
simplicity, clearness, propriety, decorum, moderation; above all, good
sense. The new Academy, founded to guard the purity of the French
language, lent its weight to the precepts of the critics, who applied the
rules of Aristotle, as commented by Longinus and Horace, to modern
conditions. The appearance of a number of admirable writers--Corneille,
Molière, Racine, Bossuet, La Fontaine, La Bruyère--simultaneously with
this critical movement, gave an authority to the new French literature
which enabled it to impose its principles upon England and Germany for
over a century. For the creative literature of France conformed its
practice, in the main, to the theory of French criticism; though not, in
the case of Regnier, without open defiance. This authority was
re-enforced by the political glories and social _éclat_ of the _siècle de
Louis Quatorze_

It happened that at this time the Stuart court was in exile, and in the
train of Henrietta Maria at Paris, or scattered elsewhere through France,
were many royalist men of letters, Etherege, Waller, Cowley, and others,