anonymous work, The Shepherd's Calendar (1579), dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. It refers, after naming Marot and Sanazarius, to 'divers other excellent both Italian and French poets whose footing this authour '-i.e. Spenser-everywhere followeth yet so as few, but they be well scented, can trace him out.' It does not, however, demand a very keen nose to retrace the footing of such a

stanza as :

Bring hither the pink and purple columbine
With gelliflowers;

Bring sweet carnations and sops-in-wine,
Worn of paramours ;

Strew me the ground with daffadowndillies,
With cowslips, and king-cups and loved lilies.
The pretty paunce

And the chevisaunce

Shall watch with the fair fleur-de-lice.

That, with its intricate metre, quickly recurrent rhyme, and profusion of flowers, is redolent of the land of the fleur de lis, and imprinted by the metrical footing of the Pléiade.

Even so late as in 1591, Spenser, at the age of thirty-nine, translates Du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome, concluding with an envoy to

Bellay, first garland of free Poesie,

in which Spenser declares the French poet's immortality, and awards him a fame 'exceeding all that ever went before.'

Thomas Watson, a contemporary of Spenser and Sidney, may be named with them as a literary renovator of lyrics. He acclaims Spenser :

Thou art Apollo, whose sweet hunnie vaine
Amongst the muses hath the chiefest place.

He sojourned in Paris with Sir Francis Walsingham, Sidney's father-in-law. In his Eclogue Sidney is Astrophill,' Francis Walsingham 'Melibus,' and Thomas Walsingham 'Tityrus,' who is made to say of the author, 'Corydon ':

Thy tunes have often pleas'd mine eare of yoare,

When milk-white swans did flocke to heare thee sing, Where Seane in Paris makes a double shoare,

Paris thrise blest if shee obey her king.

Watson was familiar with the verse of Ronsard, the French king's reigning poet. He declares the use which he made of it in prose prefaces to certain numbers of his Ἑκατομπαθία, or Passionate Centurie of Loue (1582), e.g. in the preface to xxvii. ‘In the first sixe verses of this Passion, the author hath imitated perfectly sixe verses in an ode of Ronsard, which beginneth thus: "Celui qui n'ayme est malheureux"; and in the last staffe of this Passion also he commeth very neere to the sense, which Ronsard useth in another place, where he writeth to his Mistresse in this manner: "En veus tu baiser Pluton," etc. He makes similar ascriptions of the numbers xxviii. liv. and lxxxiii. In some Latin verses prefixed to Watson's work by C. Downhalus we read:

Gallica Parnasso cœpit ditescere lingua,
Ronsardique operis Luxuriare novis.

Turning now to Sir Philip Sidney-The reviver of Poetry in those darke times' (Aubrey's Brief Lives)-let us take, as a test, the Alexandrine verse of twelve syllables, a metre peculiarly French, revived by Ronsard from a French trouvère to be the classic metre of France. In 1591, the year of Spenser's envoy to Du Bellay, Sir Philip Sidney,

Spenser's friend and comrade in lyric experiments, published Astrophel and Stella. The first sonnet is written in Alexandrine verse. But his very repudiation-in the third sonnet-of Pindar's apes who flaunt

in phrases fine,

Enamelling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold,

is obviously directed at the Pléiade, but only, I would urge, as a rhetorical development of the first sonnet, written in their metre, which ends :

'Foole,' said my Muse to me, 'looke in thy heart and write.' When addressing the Lady Penelope, as a lover, Sidney puts aside his literary masters, the more simply to adore her. But when treating of poetry, as a critic, he reveals those masters to be none other than the Pléiade, the apes of Pindar, who filled with their fame the court to which he had been accredited. Sidney had travelled in Italy. But in 1572 he was Gentleman of the Chamber to Charles IX., the king, patron, and intimate friend of Ronsard, whom his sovereign once invited, perhaps in the presence of Sidney, to sit beside him on his royal throne.

Of these three deliberate renovators Mr. Sidney Lee has written: It is clear that it was through the study of French that Spenser passed to the study of Italian.... Spenser had clearly immersed his thought in French poetry'; Sidney's masters were Petrarch and Ronsard'; and, again, 'Sidney and Watson both came under the impressive influence of Ronsard.' So much for these, but the majority of Elizabethan sonneteers concentrated their attention on contemporary France, and derived their knowledge of Italian work from adaptations by Ronsard and Desportes. Mr. Lee prints five

sonnets of Daniel side by side with their originals by Desportes, and six sonnets of Lodge side by side with their originals by Ronsard. He has shown Chapman's 'Amorous Zodiacke' to be but a close and clumsy translation from Gilles Durant. Mr. Kastner proves Constable's debt to Desportes, and, since the Pléiade's influence extended to Scotland, traces seven sonnets of Montgomery to Ronsard. Drummond of Hawthornden, who studied Ronsard, Muret, and Pontus de Tyard, did not neglect French translations of Ariosto, Tasso, and Sanazzaro.

But there is a more subtile debt due from our Elizabethans to the Pléiade which, though harder to prove with precision, is yet sensible. Apart from actual translation, and outside the sonnet-form, we can-as in the stanza quoted from Spenser-hear a haunting echo of the Pléiade's music, and see the very facture which distinguished their lyrics by its maze of varied metre and richly recurrent rhyme. This can be detected most readily in those English authors who set themselves deliberately, and with ostentation, to the task of constructing lyrics and vindicating rhyme. Daniel's Delia may take its title from Maurice Scève's Délie, but its inspiration comes certainly from Ronsard.

When winter snows upon thy sable hairs

And frost of age hath nipt thy beauties near;
When dark shall seem the day that never clears,
And all lies wither'd that was held so dear--

is pure Ronsard. Even when Daniel translates, openly, from Marino, he does it to the lilt and colour of Ronsard's music

Fair is the Lily; fair

The Rose; of Flowers the eye!

Both wither in the air,

Their beauteous colours die;

And so at length shall lie,
Deprived of former grace,

The Lilies of thy Breasts, the Roses of thy Face.

Daniel's allusion to Tyber, Arne, and Po,' the rivers of Italy, is often cited; but without the further reference to 'Loyre and Rhodanus,' the rivers of the Pléiade. Yet he drank deeply from those streams. Or take Herrick, a graduate of Cambridge, where, I have seen it stated, Ronsard's poetry was studied. Read Ronsard and then listen to

W'ave seen the past-best Times, and these
Will nere return, we see the Seas,

Herrick, I doubt not, had read Anacreon in Greek: but the Pléiade was the first to translate Anacreon into modern verse, and, what is more, to write anacreontics on a model that could be, and was, easily reproduced in English. Herrick writes Charon and Phylomel, a Dialogue Sung. But Olivier de Magny had written a dialogue between a lover and