Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/266

246 here. He served under Henri d'Angoulême. His merits as a poet were made known to Henri IV. by Cardinal du Périer, on the death of whose daughter Malherbe had written the most beautiful, in its dignified pathos, of all his poems; and from 1605 to his death he was laureate—and no poet was ever more essentially and entirely a laureate poet—to Henri, to Marie de Médicis, to Richelieu, and to Louis XIII.

Malherbe's earliest work was probably Ronsardist in character, but he soon discovered, like Pope, that his way to fame lay through "correctness," and no poet ever became a more thorough-going disciple and prophet of that useful if limited doctrine. The "poetic" which he taught, mainly through his criticism of Desportes (on whose work he made a close-running "commentaire"), and which he practised in his slowly elaborated Odes, was in part the protest of one imbued with a passionate jealousy for his native tongue, her idiom and nuances, against the innovations and licences of the Pleiad. Du Bellay and Ronsard had dreamed of creating