The causes of the transference of the course of critical empire, northwards as well as westwards, from Italy to France, in the seventeenth century, lie (except in so far as they will body themselves forth in the plain tale of this course which follows) somewhat outside the plan which has been traced for our History. [Sidenote: _The supplanting of Italy by France._] They belong, in part at least, to that “metacritic” and guesswork which we endeavour to exclude. Indeed, as usually, and more than as usually, in such case, the old puzzle of “the egg from the Owl, or the Owl from the egg?” besets us specially in this division of the History of that Art for which some have had it that the bird of Pallas is a specially suitable symbol. We can see the importance of the establishment of the French Academy, when only the first third of the century had passed, of the extraordinary influence of coteries like that of the Hotel Rambouillet, of the coincidence of the towering ambition of a youthful king and the concentrated force of his at least partially reunited kingdom, with the existence of a remarkable knot of great men of letters, including one critic of the most masterful, if not quite the most masterly, type. But can there possibly be any causation in this latter coincidence? Can we say why Conrart’s Academy, instead of lasting for a time and then breaking up, became a national institution? why the Rambouillet blue-stockings were more influential than those who haunted Mrs Montagu’s peacock-room, or put rubbish into the Bath-Easton vase? Only by guessing, or by arguing in stately circle about national temperaments. And we endeavour to avoid both these things here.[292] ----- Footnote 292: I am not aware of any History of the subject of this Book as a whole: nor even of any devoted to French seventeenth-century Criticism extensively but exclusively. The nearest thing to this latter is M. Bourgoin’s excellent _Les Maîtres de la Critique au 17ème Siècle_ (Paris, 1889), giving studies of Malherbe, Chapelain, Saint-Evremond, Boileau, and La Bruyère. For the inevitable, though tedious, quarrel of Ancients and Moderns, H. Rigault’s book on the subject (Paris, 1859) is, and is likely to remain, a standard. Monographs are, of course, innumerable; and the very large proportionate space given in the usual French literary histories to this period, makes these specially pertinent. Two of the largest volumes of M. Petit de Julleville’s book, for instance—with ample bibliographies—contain the seventeenth century only. -----