It has been said that poetry--the overflow of individual emotion--is overheard; while oratory--the appeal to an audience--is heard. The processes of Malherbe's art were essentially oratorical; the lyrical cry is seldom audible in his verse; it is the poetry of eloquence thrown into studied stanzas. But the greater poetry of the seventeenth century in France--its odes, its satires, its epistles, its noble dramatic scenes--and much of its prose literature are of the nature of oratory; and for the progress of such poetry, and even of such prose, Malherbe prepared a highway. He aimed at a reformation of the language, which, rejecting all words either base, provincial, archaic, technical, or over-learned and over-curious, should employ the standard French, pure and dignified, as accepted by the people of Paris. In his hands language became too exclusively an instrument of the intelligence; yet with this instrument great things were achieved by his successors. He methodised and regulated versification, insisting on rich and exact rhymes, condemning all licence and infirmity of structure, condemning harshness of sound, inversion, hiatus, negligence in accommodating the cesura to the sense, the free gliding of couplet into couplet. It may be said that he rendered verse mechanical; but within the arrangement which he prescribed, admirable effects were attainable by the mastery of genius. He pondered every word, weighed every syllable, and thought no pains ill-spent if only clearness, precision, the logic of ordonnance, a sustained harmony were at length secured; and until the day of his death, in 1628, no decline in his art can be perceived. Malherbe fell far short of being a great poet, but in the history of seventeenth-century classicism, in the effort of the age to rationalise the forms of art, his name is of capital importance. It cannot be said that he founded a school. His immediate disciples, MAYNARD and RACAN, failed to develop the movement which he had initiated. Maynard laid verse by the side of verse with exact care, and sometimes one or the other verse is excellent, but he lacked sustained force and flight. Racan had genuine inspiration; a true feeling for nature appears in his dramatic pastoral, the _Bergeries_ (1625); unhappily he had neither the culture nor the patience needed for perfect execution; he was rather an admirable amateur than an artist. But if Malherbe founded no school, he gave an eminent example, and the argument which he maintained in the cause of poetic art was at a later time carried to its conclusion by Boileau.