Then came the transition period to the Renaissance, with Villon and Marot, who are among the truest poets of France just because they wrote without a deliberate theory. To those two poets we English are, however, in no special debt. The _Pléiade_ next began a conscious literary reform with a propaganda of its own, only to be further reformed in turn by the poet-critic Malherbe, who inaugurated the era of “correctness,” of prose in poetry, which was consummated and legislated upon by Boileau. Thenceforth, until the early nineteenth century (the “romantic” period, when French verse is under the influence of England and Germany), French poetry is nearly all alike—clear, cleverly, often brilliantly expressed, graceful, eminently sane, but generally cold, matter-of-fact, colourless, often satirical, rarely pathetic, never deeply imaginative or informed with profound emotion. The prime characteristic of French poetry since Malherbe’s time is that it is beautified prose. The prime characteristic of the French literary mind is its willingness to be disciplined and checked, to be rendered uniform by means of rules and precepts. On English writing in verse this French literature of the “golden age,” the seventeenth century, had effect in two chief departments—in determining the school of social verse-writers and convivialists at the court of the restored Stuarts, and in dominating the poetical ideals from Dryden down to Cowper, in producing, in fact, the so-called “correct” or “classical” school of English literature, the school which said with Pope True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed. This school aimed at polished, condensed, sparkling expression of thoughts which should be reasonable and easily understandable. How defective is such an ideal of poetry needs little demonstration. The true note of the time is the treatment of mediocre subjects in language which is the perfection of neatness and point. * * * * * Along with the development of classical verse, and of the more happily directed prose which is the chief glory of French literature, there was proceeding the development of the classical drama.