mbeau descendue,
Par un commun trepas,
Est-ce quelque dedale, ou ta raison perdue
Ne se retrouve pas?

"Je sai de quels appas son enfance estoit pleine;
Et n'ay pas entrepris,
Injurieux ami, de soulager ta peine
Avecque son mepris.

"Mais elles estoit du monde, ou les plus belles choses
Ont le pire destin:
Et Rose elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses,
L'espace d'un matin."

The whole poem consists of twenty-one stanzas and should be read as a
whole; but there are several other striking passages. The consolation
the poet offers to his friend breathes the spirit of Epictetus:--

"De moy, deja deux fois d'une pareille foudre
Je me suis vu perclus,
Et deux fois la raison m'a si bien fait resoudre,
Qu'il ne m'en souvient plus.

"Non qu'il ne me soit grief que la terre possede
Ce qui me fut si cher;
Mais en un accident qui n'a point de remede,
II n'en faut point chercher."

Then follow the two stanzas cited by your correspondent, and the closing
verse is:--

"De murmurer contre-elle et perdre patience,
Il est mal-a-propos:
Vouloir ce que Dieu veut, est la seule science
Qui nous met en repos."

The stanza beginning "Le pauvre en sa cabane," is an admirable imitation
of the "Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede," &c. of Horace, which a
countryman of the poet is said to have less happily rendered "La pale
mort avec son pied de cheval," &c.

Malherbe has been duly appreciated in France: his works, in one edition,
are accompanied by an elaborate comment by Menage and Chevreau: Racan
wrote his life, and Godeau, Bishop of Vence, a panegyrical preface. He
was a man of wit, and ready at an impromptu; yet it is said, that in
writing a consolotary poem to the President de Verdun, on the death of
his wife, he was so long {105} in bringing his verses to that degree of
perfection which satisfied his own fastidious taste, that the president
was happily remarried, and the consolation not at all required.

Bishop Hurd, in a note on the _Epistle to Augustus_, p. 72., says:

"Malherbe was to the French pretty much what Horace had been to
Latin poetry. These great writers had, each of them, rescued the
lyric muse of their country out of the rude ungracious hands of
their old poets. And, as their talents of a _good ear_, _elegant
judgment_, and _correct expression_, were the same, they
presented her to the public in all the air