Explore "Malherbe" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The French Renaissance ended in the Classic. The fate of all that / exuberance was to find order, and that chaos of generation settled down / to the obedience of unchanging laws. This transition, which fixed, / perhaps for ever, the nature of the French tongue, is bound up with the / name of Malherbe.
When what the French have entitled "the great time," when the generation / of Louis XIV looked back to find an origin for its majestic security in / letters, it was in Malherbe that such an origin was discovered; he had / tamed the wildness of the Renaissance, he had bent its vigour to an / arrangement and a frame; by him first were explicitly declared those / rules within which all his successors were content to be narrowed. The / devotion to his memory is nowhere more exalted or more typically / presented than in the famous cry -- _enfin Malherbe vint_. His name / carried with it a note of completion and of an end.