Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/292

272 The first fifty years of the seventeenth century witnessed the formation and one might almost say the stereotyping of French prose as it has been spoken and written ever since. "The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries," says M. Faguet, "had prose writers and poets of genius writing in a fluctuating language, which they created as they used, which was not yet fixed and destined to remain the common patrimony of succeeding generations. The language as it can be spoken, and should be written, has for two and a half centuries been that which appears with the Cid for poetry, with the Provinciales for prose." We cannot here do more than endeavour to describe the ideals which directed the efforts of the three great shapers of perhaps the most perfect medium for the lucid communication of thought which has been formed since the age of Plato and Demosthenes.

The Malherbe of French prose was Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597-1664), the "Grand Epistolier de France." He visited Holland as a young man with Théophile, and wrote a Discours politique sur l'état des provinces unies, the liberal sentiment of which he repudiated later, and he spent a couple of years at Rome as agent for the Cardinal de la Valette. Thereafter he withdrew from public life, settled at his country-seat on the Charente, and spent his life in elaborating