Charon, long a favourite piece at the French court, which, Colletet tells us, had been set to music by the most skilful composers. The coincidence can hardly be accidental.

Or, take this track: Du Bellay writes in the metre of In Memoriam; so does Théophile, the last disciple of the Pléiade school, unjustly gibbeted by Boileau

Dans ce val solitaire et sombre

Le cerf, qui brame au bruit de l'eau
Penchant ses yeux dans un ruisseau,
S'amuse à regarder son ombre-

so does Ben Jonson; and you have but to glance at Ben Jonson's lines

Though Beauty be the mark of praise
And yours, of whom I sing, be such,
As not the world can praise too much,
Yet 'tis your virtue now I raise—

to guess the, perhaps unconscious, origin of Tennyson's melody. Ben Jonson, in his Pindaric ode, improves on Ronsard. But Ronsard first attempted a modern reproduction of strophe, antistrophe, and epode; and Ben Jonson follows closely in his steps. Perhaps the most provoking, and yet elusive, echo rings throughout Wither's Fair Virtue, The Mistress of Philarete. Compare the Picture of Fair Virtue for the sense to Ronsard's elegy to Janet, the court painter, and for both sense and rhythm to the twelfth ode in his fifth book—

Through the Veins disposed true
Crimson yields a sapphire hue,
Which adds grace and more delight

By embracing with the white.

Smooth, and moist, and soft, and tender
Are the Palms! the Fingers, slender.
Tipt with mollified pearl :-

Doights qui de beauté vaincus

Ne sont de ceux de Bacchus,

Tant leurs branchettes sont pleines

De mille rameuses veines

Par où coule le beau sang

Dedans leur yvoire blanc,

Yvoire où sont cinq perlettes

Luisantes, claires et nettes,

and on, and on, in a running rivulet of seven-syllabled verse; a metre rarely handled with success in English, but inimitably rendered by Wither to the very tune of Ronsard.

There is a case for the influence of the Pléiade on the practice of our Elizabethans and their successors. But practice is not all. The Elizabethans preached as the Pléiade had preached. The outburst of Elizabethan lyrics came some forty years after the Pléiade's decade of tumultuous production (1549-1559), and, precisely as with them, was accompanied by manifestoes on the defects of the vernacular and the methods of exalting poetry, in that medium, to the height which it held in Greece and Rome. The identity of the problems confronting the Elizabethans with the problems solved by the Pléiade is apparent from Elizabethan criticism of language and verse. Just as in France a generation earlier, so then in England, while some were content with archaic rhythms, others declared that poetry must be written in classic languages; and yet others that, though written in English, it must be crushed, without rhyme, into the moulds of classic metres. William Webbe's A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586) shows the extent of the peril to which our lyrics were exposed. He writes of This brutish Poetrie... I mean this I mean this tynkerly verse which we call ryme.' But we must not condemn his error too

6

harshly. The fact that he fell into it illustrates the reality of the difficulty with which the Elizabethans had to deal; a difficulty which would not have existed had Surrey and Wyat, by imitating Italian models, effected a new departure which could be followed up. Indeed, the contrast between the rhyme-doggerel that prevailed and classic masterpieces, familiar to scholars, goes far to explain his mistake. For that contrast was sharply projected from current translations of the classics into what passed for English verse. What could a scholar and lover of poetry make of Turberville's Ovid (1569)? Penelope opens her Epistle to Ulysses in this strain :

To thee that lingrest all too long

Thy wyfe (Ulysses) sendes:
Gayne write not but by quick returne,
For absence make amendes ..

and concludes:

And I that at thy parture was

A Gyrle to beholde :

Of truth am warte a Matrone now,

Thy selfe will iudge mee olde.

.

It needs no Holophernes to pronounce, 'For the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poetry, caret.' Webbe despaired of such an engine. He catches, for a moment, a gleam of the true dawn from the Shepheardes Calender, whose anonymous author-Spenser he calls the rightest English poet that ever I read.' Yet he is not satisfied with Spenser's muse. On the contrary, he proceeds to show how Hobinol's ditty may be civilised by casting it into the Saphick verse'; and this is what he makes of the stanza already quoted, which begins

Bring hither the pink and purple columbine :

Bring the Pinckes, therewith many Gelliflowers sweete,
And the Cullambynes : let us have the Wynesops,
With the Cornation that among the love laddes
Wontes to be worne much.

Daffadowndillies all a long the ground strewe,
And the Cowslyppe with a pretty paunce let heere lye.
Kingcuppe and Lillies so belovde of all men,
And the deluce flowre.

That is where we were in 1586, a generation after the Pléiade-two generations after Surrey and Wyat -two hundred years after Chaucer. Webbe per

petrates this 'Saphick' outrage seriatim on twelve of Spenser's thirteen stanzas, but, by reason of some let,' defers execution on the last, 'to some other time, when I hope to gratify the readers with more and better verses of this sorte.' English poetry was rescued from such torture by literary renovators who had studied the Pléiade. The darkness, made visible by Webbe's lucubration, was illumined with rays reflected from France. We have The Arte of English Poesie, ascribed to Puttenham, published in 1589; and An Apologie for Poetrie by Sir Philip Sidney, published in 1595, though circulated, unknown to Webbe, in MS., since 1582 (?).

Their manifestoes exhibit two interesting features. In the first place, they grapple with exactly those problems which the Pléiade had done much to solve, and arrive at the same solutions. In the second place, they disclose an intimate acquaintance with the rules and genius of the new French poetry which the Pléiade had created. The Elizabethan essayists in their turn sought also to renew language and construct lyric metres. For such enterprises the Italians offered no adequate model. They either wrote, often very well, in Latin, or else were content to follow

the lingua toscana of Dante and the poetic forms of Petrarch. Their work was beside the mark at which the English renovators aimed.

Sidney, in his Apologie, like the Pléiade, finds our medieval verse' apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of an uncivil age,' and, like the Pléiade, asks, 'What would it work if trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?' Apart from this aspiration he is evidently at home in the language on which the Pléiade had laboured, and well aware that it approached more nearly than Italian to English as a medium for modern verse.

He dwells on rhymes by the French named masculine and feminine,' claiming a like, indeed a greater, variety for English, and denying it altogether to Italian. He points out that the French have the cæsura, or breathing-place, in the middest of the verse,' and that we almost unfailingly observe the same rule, which is unknown to the Italian or Spaniard. And so, too, with Puttenham. Puttenham, indeed, trounces an English translator for conveying too crudely' the hymnes of Pyndarus, Anacreon's odes, and other lirickes among the Greeks, very well translated by Rounsard, the French Poet, and applied to the honour of a great Prince in France.' He objects to the use of French words-freddon, egar, etc.-' which have no maner of conformitie with our language.' But his theories are largely the theories of the Pléiade, and he evinces a peculiar knowledge of their art. He writes, this metre of twelve sillables the French man calleth a verse Alexandrine, and is with our modern rimers most usuall.' If that was true in 1589, it follows that much English verse has been lost which was modelled on Ronsard's metre.