Note 297 — Chapter I · FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU.
Reading edition
The French critics, however, have perhaps taken too literally his reported blasphemy, that he did not value a good poet above a good player at ninepins. Malherbe was a Norman—that is to say, a parcel-Englishman—and may well have had something of that English humour of disparaging his own matters which is so incomprehensible to the French.