school. To this school succeeded the reaction of Malherbe and his
fellows, who sought to drive from the French tongue all the exotic
graces that their predecessors had tried to nationalize on Parnassus. It
was a Bohemian, Mathurin Regnier, who was one of the last defenders of
the bulwarks of poetry, assailed by the phalanx of rhetoricians and
grammarians who declared Rabelais barbarous and Montaigne obscure. It
was this same cynic, Mathurin Regnier, who, adding fresh knots to the
satiric whip of Horace, exclaimed, in indignation at the manners of his
day, "Honor is an old saint past praying to."

The roll call of Bohemia during the seventeenth century contains a
portion of the names belonging to the literature of the reigns of Louis
XIII and Louis XIV, it reckons members amongst the wits of the Hôtel
Rambouillet, where it takes its share in the production of the
"Guirlande de Julie," it has its entries into the Palais Cardinal, where
it collaborates, in the tragedy of "Marianne," with the poet-minister
who was the Robespierre of the monarchy. It bestrews the couch of Marion
Delorme with madrigals, and woos Ninon de l'Enclos beneath the trees of
the Place Royal; it breakfasts in the morning at the tavern of the
Goinfres or the Epee Royale, and sups in the evening at the table of the
Duc de Joyeuse; it fights duels under a street lamp for the sonnet of
Urania against the sonnet of Job. Bohemia makes love, war, and even
diplomacy, and in its old days, weary of adventures, it turns the Old
and New Testament into poetry, figures on the list of benefices, and
well nourished with fat prebendaryships, seats itself on an episcopal
throne, or a chair of the Academy, founded by one of its children.

It was in the transition period between the sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries that appeared those two lofty geniuses, whom each of the
nations amongst which they lived opposed to one another in their