This and other passages are enough to show that Régnier had the imagination as well as the temperament of the true poet. Therefore, in spite of his free imitation of the ancients, he remains original--a great poet of the order of Clément Marot. What he borrows he makes his own, and in adapting passages from the Roman writers to the Gallic manners of his own day he not infrequently improves them. And apart from his satires, he reveals in his lyrics, to a high degree, the same poetical sensibility, and he describes with a melodious melancholy the poet’s regret for the days that are no more:-- ‘Un regret pensif et confus D’avoir été et n’être plus Rend mon âme aux douleurs ouverte; A mes dépens, las! je vois bien Qu’un bonheur comme était le mien Ne se cognait que par la perte.’ Mathurin was relieved from the restraints of paternal authority in 1591. For in that year his father was thrown into prison, under circumstances typical of the time. Philippe Desportes had chosen Jacques Régnier to farm one of his benefices, the Abbey of Josaphat, but he, instead of devoting himself wholly to the peaceful cultivation of the land, exerted himself politically on the side of the Chartrain _Ligueurs_. The good King Henry, whose habit it was to draw less blood than money from rebellious citizens, fined him sixteen hundred crowns, and, when he failed to pay, threw him into prison at Chartres. There he remained some months. His son, meanwhile, who had already got himself into trouble by writing lampoons on the inhabitants of his native town, and repeating them to the frequenters of a tennis-court which his father had built, took this opportunity of slipping away to Paris. There his uncle, Desportes, recommended him to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toulouse, François de Joyeuse, and he took part in that prelate’s embassy to Rome. At the same time he was presented with the small priory of Bouzancourt. Thus one fine morning he, ‘Vif de courage abandonna la France.’ He seemed to be on the high road to fortune. But though a better poet he was a worse courtier than his uncle. In ten years spent with Joyeuse and his successor, the young secretary earned nothing except experience. Of that and its fruits he earned more than enough. He indulged without restraint in the careless joy of living, and he suffered, like so many of his contemporaries, from the intense delight in life and the feverish gratification of the pleasures of the flesh which marked the Renaissance movement. For men were encouraged to give free reign to the _bonne loi naturelle_ by the whole spirit of an age which was a revolt from the gloomy monasticism of the Middle Ages. Of the results, in his own case, of such indulgence and of his sufferings, which had nothing in common with those of the saints, Mathurin Régnier tells us in some of his passages more than we care to know.