everything—to insist not merely that the work shall be good, but that it shall be good according to sealed patterns, in choice of subject as well as in method, in method as well as in form, in form as well as in language. ----- Footnote 305: There was, however, a remnant. Even Balzac called him “Le tyran des mots et des syllabes;” even Chapelain recognised (acutely enough) the fact that his methods were rhetorical rather than poetical; even Tallemant practically summed him up, once and for all, in the words, “Il n’avait pas beaucoup de génie: la méditation et l’art l’ont fait poëte.” But the majority and the hour were with him. ----- There can be very little doubt that the private discussions which, as we know from Racan, Malherbe used, for years before his death, to hold with Racan himself and others, and the letters which he also exchanged with younger men, had a very great deal to do with the wide development of criticism in the second third of the century. [Sidenote: _The diffusion of seventeenth century criticism._] The fact of this development is certain; it is vouched for by the appearance of literary subjects in the _Ana_, and in Tallemant’s _Historiettes_, by the foundation of the Academy, by the _Cid_ quarrel, practically by almost everything we know of the time that concerns literature. But we must deal, according to our wont, with the matter _par personnages_. Of such personages we have, in the first place, Vaugelas, Balzac, Ogier, and Chapelain, to whom we may join Ménage, Gui Patin, Tallemant himself, and the far greater names of Saint-Evremond and Corneille. Then we can take Boileau—at least in reputation one of the culminating points or personages of our history—and the less exclusively critical deliverances of La Bruyère, of Fénelon, and of Malebranche; can give some account of the Quarrel—tenacious of life, if scarcely vivacious—of the Ancients and Moderns; diverge to the scholastic and somewhat dismal but important performances of La Mesnardière and others, of Hédelin and Le Bossu, Rapin and Bouhours, and end by some account of the miscellaneous compilations and observations of journalists and _savants_. The matter is abundant in all conscience; it is at least sufficiently varied, and the real greatness of some at least of the persons concerned should save it from being insipid.