he author. It is entitled
'Macette,' and describes an old woman who hides vice under a
hypocritical mask and corrupts youth with her evil philosophy of the
world and its ways. Indebted in some measure to the _Roman de la Rose_
for the idea of his central character, Regnier is entirely original in
his method of treatment. Nowhere are his verses more vigorous--

Son oeil tout penitent ne pleure qu'eau beniste.
L'honneur est un vieux saint que l'on ne chomme plus.
La sage se sait vendre ou la sotte se donne.

Nowhere is Regnier so uniformly free from technical defects and from
colloquialisms in which he sometimes indulges. The fourteenth returns to
general and somewhat vague satire, dealing with the vanity of human
reason and conduct, while the fifteenth is once more personal, 'Le Poete
malgre soi.' Lastly, the sixteenth sums up the author's theoretical
philosophy in the opening line, 'N'avoir crainte de rien et ne rien
esperer.'

The satires are in bulk and in importance so much the larger part of the
work of Regnier, and represent such an important innovation in French
literature, that it has seemed well to describe them with some
minuteness. The miscellaneous poems may be reviewed more rapidly, though
the best of them add very considerably to the poet's reputation, because
they show him in an entirely different light. Not a few of the elegies
are imitated from Ovid, and some of them might perhaps have been left
unwritten with advantage. Indeed, Regnier is here much more open to
Boileau's censure than in his more famous verse. But some lyrical pieces
exhibit his command of other measures besides the Alexandrine, and
afford occasion for the expression of a melancholy and genuine
sensibility which is not common in French poetry. The poem called
'Plainte' is very beautiful, and is written in a lyric stanza of much
more elaboration than any which was to be used in France for two
centuries. One of its peculiarities is a hemistich replacing the
expected fourth line of the stanza, which is of eight verses, with
singularly musical effect. A so-called 'Ode' is almost better, and ends
thus:--

Un regret pensif et confus
D'avoir este, et n'estre plus,
Rend mon ame aux douleurs ouverte;
A mes despens, las! je vois bien
Qu'un bonheur comme estoit le mien
Ne se cognoist que par la perte.

Regnier was in many ways a fitting representative for the close of the
great poetical school of the six