The first hundred lines are the best part of the satire, and the remainder is, to a certain extent, amplification and repetition. Yet it is good art, and good sense, not merely in the scattered phrases— “Sans juger nous jugeons,” and “Votre raison vous trompe, aussi bien que vos yeux,” and “O débile raison! où est ores ta bride,” which hit at once the foible and the forte of the criticism of the century; but in the final sting— “Mais, Rapin, à leur gout si les vieux sont profanes,— Si Virgile, le Tasse, et Ronsard sont des ânes— Sans perdre en ces discours les temps que nous perdons, Allons comme eux aux champs, et mangeons des chardons!” One might write a whole essay on these wonderfully prophetic and (no doubt to the writer half-unconsciously) many-sided[304] lines. After two centuries Europe did “go to the fields”—and she found something better to eat there than thistles. ----- Footnote 304: For instance, the _yoking_ of Virgil, Tasso, and Ronsard. This Pisgah-sight of literature was what the Renaissance, and the whole neo-classic period, almost invariably failed to attain. ----- For the moment, as we have seen before in other cases, the voice crying in the wilderness found only a wilderness to cry in. [Sidenote: _The contrast of the two a lasting one._] Men could not mistake the vigour and verve of Regnier’s verse, but they either disregarded his doctrine or misunderstood it. Malherbe was their music-maker then; they understood _him_.[305] In the contrast of these two we have practically a contrast which subsists to the present day, and which we do not find by any means so sharply accentuated in ancient criticism—that of the critic who looks only at the stop-watch, and of the critic who looks beyond it; of the critic of form and the critic of spirit. But the curious thing is that for the last three centuries the antagonists have behaved exactly like Hamlet and Laertes, or even like that puzzling pair in the lower circles of the _Inferno_. They take from time to time each other’s parts, each other’s weapons, and renew the contest with changed persons, or at least rapiers. At first sight it may seem as if Malherbe and, after him, Boileau were simply insisting on form and expression; as if Regnier, and those who at longer intervals have followed him, were those who say that “all depends upon the subject.” But a more accurate acquaintance with the History which is to follow will show us that this is far from being the case. Malherbe had so little opportunity of shaping, or took such little trouble to shape, his critical ideas that it is perhaps the safer way not to draw up any complete creed for him, as M. Brunot and Mr Spingarn have done. But in Boileau, as we shall see, there is a distinct attempt, which has been practically followed by all of his side since, to prescribe expression, subject, spirit, and