Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/269

Rh and Honorat de Bueil, Seigneur de Racan (1589-1670), are but minor bards. Maynard, who in his earliest volume had followed in the footsteps of the Pleiad and composed Italianate Amours, Élégies, Pastorales, and Vers Spirituels, became the most faithful disciple and follower of his master in theory and practice. He insisted that the sense in every line should be complete, a rule fatal to lyrical inspiration, and his odes are strings of well-hammered commonplaces. He cultivated, besides the sonnet, the rondeau and the epigram. On his epigrams he rather plumed himself, but Malherbe declared that they wanted point. La Belle Vicille is perhaps the only poem he wrote in which there is a spark of passion. Racan was a careless writer, but with more of grace and charm than Maynard. He paraphrased the psalms in a variety of metres. There are touches of beautiful description in Les Bergeries, of which we shall have to speak again, and he composed some delightful odes in the lighter Epicurean vein of Horace. The best is probably the Stances beginning "Tircis, il faut penser à faire la retraite," which, like Jonson's To Sir Robert Wroth, are a happy echo of Horace's "Beatus ille." His more ambitious odes are mere imitations of Malherbe's. Other disciples of Malherbe are little more than names.

The fact is, the influence of Malherbe's reform was not fully felt at once. It acted perhaps immediately