There was something pregnant, noble, and brilliant about Ronsard, in spite of his exaggerations of style and faults of taste; his friends and disciples imitated and carried to an extreme his defects, without possessing his talent; the unruliness was such as to call for reform.  Peace revived with Henry IV., and the court, henceforth in accord with the nation, resumed that empire over taste, manners, and ideas, which it was destined to exercise so long and so supremely under Louis XIV.  Malherbe became the poet of the court, whose business it was to please it, to adopt for it that literature which had but lately been reserved for the feasts of the learned.  “He used often to say, and chiefly when he was reproached with not following the meaning of the authors he translated or paraphrased, that he did not dress his meat for cooks, as if he had meant to infer that he cared very little to be praised by the literary folks who understood the books he had translated, provided that he was understood by the court-folks.”  A complete revolution in the opposite direction to that which Ronsard attempted appeared to have taken place, but the human mind never loses all the ground it has once won; in the verses of Malherbe, often bearing the imprint of beauties borrowed from the ancients, the language preserved, in consequence of the character given to it by Ronsard, a dignity, a richness of style, of which the times of Marot showed no conception; and it was falling, moreover, under the chastening influence of an elegant correctness.  It was for the court that Malherbe made verses,"striving, as he said, to degasconnize it,” seeking there his public and the source of honor as well as profit.  As passionate an admirer of Richelieu as of Henry IV., naturally devoted to the service of the order established in the state as well as in poetry, he, under the regency of Mary de’ Medici, favored the taste which was beginning to show itself for intellectual things, for refined pleasures, and elegant occupations.  It was not around the queen that this honorable and agreeable society gathered; it was at the Hotel Rambouillet, around Catherine de Vivonne, in Rue St. Thomas du Louvre.  Literature was there represented by Malherbe and Racan, afterwards by Balzac and Voiture, Gombault and Chapelain, who constantly met there, in company with Princess de Conde and her daughter, subsequently Duchess de Longueville, Mademoiselle du Vigean, Madame and Mdlle. d’Epernon, and the Bishop of Lucon himself, quite young as yet, but already famous.  “All the wits were received at the Hotel Rambouillet, whatever their condition,” says M. Cousin:  “all that was asked of them was to have good manners; but the aristocratic tone was established there without any effort, the majority of the guests at the house being very great lords, and the mistress being at one and the same time Rambouillet and Vivonne.  The wits were courted and honored, but they did not hold the dominion.”  At that great period