Not to be confounded with the critic and versifier, René Rapin, who was not born till after Regnier’s death, and whom to call “favourite, &c.,” would indeed have been a dreadful thing to do; still less with the historian Rapin de Thoyras, who was a generation later again. This Rapin was Nicolas, part author of the glorious _Satire Menippée_, victor in the burlesque contest of the Flea (see Southey’s _Doctor_), a good versifier in Latin, and no ill one in French, though he was of the (in France not very numerous) partisans of classical metres. He died in 1608, not long after the date of this satire. Footnote 303: I read my Regnier in two editions, both very desirable as books, and of different merits otherwise. The one, that of Prosper Poitevin (Paris, 1860), is very compact; and, besides other matter, has the old commentary of Brossette, which is extremely interesting as expressing the views of a disciple of Boileau on a poet whom, to do him justice, Boileau could not but admire, though he characteristically belittled him. The other, that of E. Courbet (Paris, 1875), has a text adjusted in the scrupulous modern manner, and some important additions to the biography. ----- If we have given Malherbe the credit of being the first modern critic to play the awful Aristarch with a contemporary in the true and full Aristarchian manner, Regnier must deserve that of being the first poet of genius in modern times to undertake a real _chevauchée_ in the interests of the true criticism against the false. [Sidenote: _His_ Ninth Satire.] The Satire is not faultless; there is some divagation, and an attempt (giving some countenance to the deplorable excesses, in the opposite direction of insulting poverty, which Boileau and Pope permit themselves) to set the profits and prosperity of Desportes against the comparative neediness of Malherbe. But this neediness was only comparative; and Regnier has the good taste never to name his adversary, and to let the arrows find their mark without vulgar personal abuse. The spirit of the piece is delightful; its straight hitting never baulks the game; and the verse is often of the very first quality. Read—I only wish I had room to quote—the passage, which only Juvenal and Dryden have equalled, on Malherbe’s contempt alike of the Greeks and the Pléiade (20-27); that on his elevation of the mere vernacular, as the test of language, which follows; the denunciation of his arrogant assumption of knowledge as being his own peculiar, which follows that; and the famous diatribe of forty verses long, and with every other verse a triumph, which scoffs at the anxiety— “Prendre garde qu’un _qui_ ne heurte une diphtongue,” which labels the whole proceeding— “C’est proser de la rime et rimer de la prose;” compares it to the tricks of rouging and dressing up in women, and contrasts the natural beauties of poetry with all this powder and pomatum.