Note 302 — Chapter I · FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU.

Not to be confounded with the critic and versifier, René Rapin, who was not born till after Regnier’s death, and whom to call “favourite, &c.,” would indeed have been a dreadful thing to do; still less with the historian Rapin de Thoyras, who was a generation later again. This Rapin was Nicolas, part author of the glorious Satire Menippée, victor in the burlesque contest of the Flea (see Southey’s Doctor), a good versifier in Latin, and no ill one in French, though he was of the (in France not very numerous) partisans of classical metres. He died in 1608, not long after the date of this satire.