Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/268

248 virtue of his work. He invented no new stanzas, but selected and embellished those of the Pleiad which were best suited to his oratorical style. But whether the stanza be a long one made up of octosyllabics, or a shorter one in Alexandrines, Malherbe's verse at its best has a pomp and clangour which it would be difficult to surpass. The ode Pour le Roi, written on the Rochelle expedition, is perhaps the finest example of the "grand vers"—

"Je suis vaincu du temps; je cède à ses outrages;           Mon esprit seulement, exempt de sa rigueur,            A de quoi témoigner en ses derniers ouvrages                            Sa premiere vigueur."

In the same strain, and with equal dignity, he writes in what is his favourite ode stanza:—

"Apollon à portes ouvertes                    Laisse indifféremment cueillir                     Les belles feuilles toujours vertes                     Qui gardent les noms de vieillir;                     Mais l'art d'en faire les couronnes                     N'est pas su de toutes personnes;                     Et trois ou quatre seulement,                     Au nombre desquels on me range,                     Peuvent donner une louange                     Qui demeure éternellement."

Malherbe was not the immediate founder of any important school of poetry. Of his "sons," as Jonson would have called them—the young poets who gathered around him to receive his lectures on good French and permissible rhymes—the most important, François Maynard (1582-1646)