Introduced to the literary coterie of the Hotel de Rambouillet, a new view opened on the favoured poet.  To occupy a seat in this envied circle was a distinction in society.  The professed object of this reunion of nobility and literary persons, at the hotel of the Marchioness of Rambouillet, was to give a higher tone to all France, by the cultivation of the language, the intellectual refinement of their compositions, and last, but not least, to inculcate the extremest delicacy of manners.  The recent civil dissensions had often violated the urbanity of the court, and a grossness prevailed in conversation which offended the scrupulous.  This critical circle was composed of both sexes.  They were to be the arbiters of taste, the legislators of criticism, and, what was less tolerable, the models of genius.  No work was to be stamped into currency which bore not the mint-mark of the hotel.

In the annals of fashion and literature no coterie has presented a more instructive and amusing exhibition of the abuses of learning, and the aberrations of ill-regulated imaginations, than the Hotel de Rambouillet, by its ingenious absurdities.  Their excellent design to refine the language, the manners, and even morality itself, branched out into every species of false refinement; their science ran into trivial pedantries, their style into a fantastic jargon, and their spiritualising delicacy into the very puritanism of prudery.  Their frivolous distinction between the mind and the heart, which could not always be made to go together, often perplexed them as much as their own jargon, which was not always intelligible, even to the initiated.  The French Academy is said to have originated in the first meetings of the Hotel de Rambouillet; and it is probable that some sense and taste, in its earliest days, may have visited this society, for we do not begin such refined follies without some show of reason.

The local genius of the hotel was feminine, though the most glorious men of the literature of France were among its votaries.  The great magnet was the famed Mademoiselle Scudery, whose voluminous romances were their code; and it is supposed these tomes preserve some of their lengthened conversaziones.  In the novel system of gallantry of this great inventor of amorous and metaphysical “twaddle,” the ladies were to be approached as beings nothing short of celestial paragons; they were addressed in a language not to be found in any dictionary but their own, and their habits were more fantastic than their language:  a sort of domestic chivalry formed their etiquette.  Their baptismal names were to them profane, and their assumed ones were drawn from the folio romances—­those Bibles of love.  At length all ended in a sort of Freemasonry of gallantry, which had its graduated orders, and whoever was not admitted into the mysteries was not permitted to prolong his existence—­that is, his residence among them.  The apprenticeship of the craft was to be served under certain Introducers to Ruelles.