esponded to the movement which, all around him, was
ushering in the Bourbons: the hardening of Goujon's and de l'Orme's
luxuriance into the conventions of the great colonnades and the sombre
immensity of the new palaces; the return of one national faith to a
people weary of so many random quarrels; the mistrust of an ill-ordered
squirearchy; the firm founding of a central government.

He was Norman. Right of that north whence the vigour, though not the
inspiration, of the Renaissance had proceeded, and into which it
returned. Caen gave him birth, and still remembers him. Normans still
edit his works--and dedicate these books to the town which also bred
Corneille. Norman, learned with that restrained but vigorous learning of
the province, he was also of the province in his blood, for he came of
one of those fixed families whose heads held great estates all round
Falaise, and whose cadets branched off into chances abroad: one of the
Boughtons, in Kent, is still "Boughton Malherbe[1]."

[Footnote 1: Not from the Conquest. It is near Charing, originally de
Braose land, but an heiress married a Malherbe in the early twelfth
century.]

He was poor. His father, who held one of those magistracies which the
smaller nobility bought or inherited, had not known where to turn in the
turmoil of the central century. In a moment of distress he called
himself Huguenot when that party seemed to triumph, and Malherbe in
anger against the apostasy went down south, a boy of nineteen, and
fought as a soldier--but chiefly duels; for he loved that sport. He lay
under a kind of protection from the great Catholic houses, though still
poor, till in 1601--he was a man of forty-six--Henri IV heard of him. In
all these years he had worked at the rule of poetry like an artisan,
thinking of nothing else, not even of fame. Those who surrounded him
took it for granted that he was a master critic--a sort of judge without
appeal, but it was a very little provincial circle surrounding a very
unimportant house in Provence. Thus, careless it seems of everything
except that "form of language" which was with him a passion, like the
academic or theological passions, he was astonished on coming to Paris
in 1605 to discover how suited such a pre-occupation was to such a time,
and how rapidly he became the first name in contemporary letters. Of men
who poured out verse the age was satiated; of men who could seize the
language at this turn in its fortune, fix it