Like his master, he is best when he follows the models whom that master contemned. Perhaps more than any other poet, he set the example of the classical alexandrine, the smooth and melodious but monotonous and rather effeminate measure which Racine was to bring to the highest perfection, and which his successors, while they could not improve its smoothness, were to make more and more monotonous until the genius of Victor Hugo once more broke up its facile polish, supplied its stiff uniformity, and introduced vigour, variety, colour and distinctness in the place of its feeble sameness and its pale indecision. But the vigour, not to say the licence, of the 16th century could not thus die all at once. In Theophile de Viau (1591-1626) the early years of the 17th century had their Villon. The later poet was almost as unfortunate as the earlier, and almost as disreputable, but he had a great share of poetical and not a small one of critical power. The _etoile enragee_ under which he complains that he was born was at least kind to him in this respect; and his readers, after he had been forgotten for two centuries, have once more done him justice. Racan and Theophile were followed in the second quarter of the century by two schools which sufficiently well represented the tendencies of each. The first was that of Vincent Voiture (1598-1648), Isaac de Benserade (1612-1691), and other poets such as Claude de Maleville (1597-1647), author of _La Belle Matineuse_, who were connected more or less with the famous literary coterie of the Hotel de Rambouillet. Theophile was less worthily succeeded by a class, it can hardly be called a school of poets, some of whom, like Gerard Saint-Amant (1594-1660), wrote drinking songs of merit and other light pieces; others, like Paul Scarron (1610-1660) and Sarrasin (1603? 4? 5?-1654), devoted themselves rather to burlesque of serious verse. Most of the great dramatic authors of the time also wrote miscellaneous poetry, and there was even an epic school of the most singular kind, in ridiculing and discrediting which Boileau for once did undoubtedly good service. The _Pucelle_ of Jean Chapelain (1595-1674), the unfortunate author who was deliberately trained and educated for a poet, who enjoyed for some time a sort of dictatorship in French literature on the strength of his forthcoming work, and at whom from the day of its publication every critic of French literature has agreed to laugh, was the most famous and perhaps the worst of these. But Georges de Scudery (1601-1667) wrote an _Alaric_, the Pere le Moyne (1602-1671) a _Saint Louis_, Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin (1595-1676), a dramatist and critic of some note, a _Clovis_, and Saint-Amant a _Moise_, which were not much better, though Theophile Gautier in his _Grotesques_ has valiantly defended these and other contemporary versifiers. And indeed it cannot be denied that even the epics, especially _Saint Louis_,