the choice of words.
It had become in fact exceedingly coarse. The poetry of the Pleiade was
not as a rule open to this charge, but the early poetry and prose of the
seventeenth century must submit to it. One effect of the process of
correction and reform was a decided improvement in this matter.

But the vocabulary was by no means the only thing that underwent
revision. Other constituents of literature shared in the same
experience, and much more beneficially, for the expurgation of the
dictionary was unfortunately made to involve the weeding out of many
terms which were not open to the slightest exception, and the loss of
which deprived the tongue of much of its picturesqueness. No such
concomitant defect attended the reformations in grammar which, begun by
the grammarians of the sixteenth century, were pursued still more
systematically by Vaugelas and his followers. There can hardly be too
much precision observed in matters of accidence and syntax; while it is
desirable that the vocabulary should be as rich as possible, provided
that its terms are vernacular or properly naturalised. The same may be
said of some at least of the reforms of Malherbe in prosody and the
minutiae of poetical art. So too the advance made to something like a
uniform orthography was of no small importance. The result of this
general criticism was the group (or rather groups, for they may be
divided into at least two, the earlier comprising Descartes, Corneille,
Pascal, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, Bossuet, Madame de Sevigne, La
Fontaine, and Moliere, in other words, most of the greatest names)
illustrating the so-called _Grand Siecle_, or Siecle de Louis Quatorze.
The two names that stand first in this list, Descartes and Corneille,
represent at once the initial change and in addition the greatest
accomplishment in the direction of change effected by any individual.
The others worthily followed where they led. This group, as has been
more than once pointed out, does not shine in poetry proper. But it has
hardly a rival in prose and in that measured and declamatory or easy and
pedestrian verse which is half prose, half poetry.

Long, however, before the century ended, the evils which invariably
attend upon a critical period, especially--it is paradoxical but
true--when it is at the same time a period of considerable creative
power, began to manifest themselves. These evils may be briefly
described as the natural results of the drawing up