Early in the seventeenth century flourished the man to whom first were due those definite and despotic critical principles which were fully developed by Boileau and which came to tyrannize in England after the restoration of Charles II, subsequently reaching their perfection in Pope and his eighteenth-century school. It is true that Malherbe represents a movement which was simultaneously proceeding in Italy, and was also being begun in England by Waller and his follower Denham. But he was destined to exert a peculiar influence. François Malherbe was by nature critic, and not creator. He, like the _Pléiade_, offers himself as a deliberate reformer of literature. His thoughts are fixed on style and its correctness. His notion of verses is that they should be “beautiful as prose,” without any of the bold irregularities of a Pindar or the sentimental vagaries of a Petrarch. He measures words and syllables, toils laboriously over every line he writes, and prunes down metaphors and hazardous expressions with the deliberate knife of cold reason. What he compasses is conciseness and preciseness of phrase, and what he revels in is the sense, not of a profound thought or keen emotion expressed, but of a technical difficulty overcome. He is the true parent of all that verse, in reality but brilliant rhyming prose, which prevailed in France for two centuries, and which also reigned in England for at least one. It is he who taught Corneille and Racine how to form a verse, and Boileau how to criticize one. It was Boileau who passed on the word to our English Pope, Parnell, Gay, and Johnson. Dryden was doubtless the intermediate step, but it is to Boileau that Pope expressly resorts. But for Boileau, Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_ would not have existed.