. du Perier, whose daughter Marguerite had
died in her youth. He seems to have written verses tolerably early, but,
exercising on himself the same rigid principles of criticism which he
applied to others, he preserved none or hardly any of them. It was not
till he was past forty that his best-known poems were written, and the
whole amount of his surviving work is not large. During the first
two-thirds of his life he was not rich, for his patrimony was scanty,
and the death of the Grand Prior, Henri d'Angouleme, to whom he had
attached himself, deprived him of the chances of preferment. But in
1605 he was presented to Henri IV.; he soon afterwards received various
places, and for more than twenty years was a court favourite, and in a
way the autocrat of poetry. He died in 1628.

It has been said that Malherbe's poetical work is by no means
voluminous: a small volume of two hundred pages, not very closely or
minutely printed, contains it all; and ingenious persons have calculated
that as a rule he did not write more than four or five verses a month.
Nor even of this carefully produced, and still more carefully weeded,
result is there much that can be read with pleasure by a modern student
of poetry. The verse by which Malherbe is best known,

Et, rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses,

is worth all the rest of his work, and it can hardly be said to be more
than a very graceful and touching conceit. But Malherbe's position in
the history of French poetry is a very important one. He deliberately
assumed the functions of a reformer of literature; and whatever may be
thought of the result of his reforms, their durability and the almost
entire acquiescence with which they were received prove that there must
have been something in them remarkably germane to the spirit and taste
and genius of the nation. His first attempt was the overthrow of the
Pleiade. He ridiculed their phraseology, frowned on their metres, and,
being himself destitute of the romantic inspiration which had animated
them, set himself to reduce poetry to carefully-worded metrical prose.
The story is always told of him that he went minutely through a copy of
Ronsard, striking out whatever he disapproved of; and when some one
pointed out the mass of lines that were left, that he drew his pen
(presumably across the title-page, for it is not obvious how else he
could have done it) through the rest at one stroke. The insolent folly
of this is glaring enou