and discourses of the snail with the fair palace he carries along slimy tracts among the fresh grass and flowers, shooting out his horns, a warrior of the garden, who pastures on the dew with which his house is besprinkled. He attends the services of his priory and honours his prelate. If others had done so, there would have been no civil troubles, the fair sun of the ancient age of Astræa would shine over all France. No ritters from the Rhine would have drunk her vintage and squandered her money. No English would have bought her lands. It is absurd for a Calvinist to judge a Catholic, as though a Jew accused a Turk, or a Turk a Christian; God only, the unfailing Judge, knows the hearts of all. He goes on:

You say my muse is paid to flatter. No prince can boast (I wish he could) of having paid me a salary. I serve whom I please with unfettered courage. I sing the king, his brother, and mother. Of others I am not the valet: if they are mighty lords, I too have a high heart.

'You say I have been a student, a courtier, a soldier. Quite true. But I have never been a street-preacher or hypocrite (cafard), selling my vain dreams to ignorant men. I'd rather row in a galley, or labour with swollen hands in fields that no one has heard of, than cease to be a gentleman in order to become a cheat (pipeur). You say it ill becomes me to speak of virtue: Pharisee! If all the ambrosia and nectar of heaven be yours, still le bon Dieu will keep us a little brown bread. If your new sect should carry you to Paradise, our old one will at least see the door, and we, poor banished wretches, by God's goodness, will still find some room in a retired corner of His house, though, as in reason, the

best places must be for you who are children of grace. And yet let me remind you of the Pharisee and the Publican. After all, virtue cannot be shut up in Geneva. She is a winged creature, who passes over the sea, takes flight to the sky, and traverses the earth like lightning, the wandering guest of all the world!

La vertu ne se peut à Genève enfermer :
Elle a le dos ailé, elle passe la mer,

Elle s'envole au ciel, elle marche sur terre

Viste comme un esclair, messager du tonnerre

Ainsi de peuple en peuple elle court par le monde,
De ce grand univers l'hostesse vagabonde.

'You say that in my frenzy I scatter my verses like leaves to the wind. I do. Poetry is an art; but not comparable to the fixed arts of preaching and prose. The right poets have their hidden artifice, which does not seem art to verse-mongers, but fares forth under a free restraint whithersoever the muse may lead it. I gather my honey, as the bees do, from every flower of Parnassus. I am mad, if you please, when I hold a pen, but without one, perfectly sane. You are like a child who, seeing giants and chimæras in the clouds, holds the pageant for truth. The verses with which I disport myself, you take in earnest; but neither your verses nor mine are oracles.

'You say that the fame I once had is defeated. Do you really suppose that your sect embraces all the world? You are very much mistaken. I have too much fame. I would rather without noise or renown be but a shepherd or a labourer. There is no happiness in being pointed at in the street.

Celuy n'est pas heureux qu'on montre par la rue.

'You say that I should die overwhelmed with sorrow did I see our Roman Church fall. I should be unhappy. But I have a stout heart, and that inside my head which, if tempests come, must swim with me through the floods. Perhaps your head, if we do reach an unknown shore, will turn out to be useless.

'No! no! I do not depend on Church revenues or royal favour. I live a true poet and have deserved as well of my country as you, false impostor and braggart that you are.

'All your barking will not strip me of the laurel wreath I have deserved for service done to the French language.

'Undaunted by toil I have laboured for the mother-tongue of France. I have made her new words and restored the old. I have raised her poetry to a level with the art of Rome and Greece. I repent me of the deed if this art is to be used by heretics to serve the ends of shop-boys.

'You-and you cannot deny it are the issue of my muse. You are my subjects; I your only king. You are my streams. I am your fountain. The more you exhaust me, the more does my unfailing spring cast back the sands and gush forth perpetually to fulfil your rivulets.'

There is more in this haughty strain. But at the last he prays God devoutly that the fearful end of civil strife may be averted, and that the torch of war, like a brand in the fire, may consume itself in smoke.

Le feu, le fer, le meurtre, en sont le fondement,
Dieu veuille que la fin en arrive autrement,
Et que le grand flambeau de la guerre allumée,
Comme un tison de feu, se consomme en fumée.

I have made this long citation because it reveals the man, more fully than any list, however congested, of names and dates; and because it supplies a corrective to conventional views based on this or that obvious feature of Ronsard's poetry. It is important to know that a poet chiefly remembered for a few plaintive songs of fading roses, and a deliberate attempt to recast a language and develop the mechanism of verse, was every inch a man who stood four-square to the whole racket of his day.

For this, so far from diminishing the value of his particular love of loveliness, and personal servitude to the machinery of art, tends, on the contrary, to prove the general importance to mankind of these things for which he cared most. It is clear that he cared also, and acutely, for much that other men prize. Here is a citizen and a soldier, a man who takes a side in politics and religion, who argues from the rostrum and pommels in the ring, a conservative with a catholic pleasure in life, delighting in all the treasures garnered into the citadel of the past, and ready to die in its defence. Yet his life-work, for all these distractions, consists in an exaltation of Beauty that must die

And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding Adieu :

consists in that; and in a curious attention to the formalities of verse, to the artistic liturgy of beauty which affirms, paradoxically, that Beauty, by reason of her certitude, is, despite of death, in some irrational way at once divine and immortal. That mystical message comes from a human, sturdy, God-fearing, battle-stained man with accents of dignity that die upon the lips' of monastic devotees to art cloistered for its own sake.

Little else need be said of his life. After the death of Charles IX. an immense solitude encompassed the man who had taken part in so many activities. Tasso, it is true, in 1575, submitted to him at Paris the earlier cantos of his Jerusalem Delivered. But Ronsard retired from the Court of Henri III. His life had, he writes, become a continual death, so he sought out the Priory of St. Cosme to die. I strayed to the place by pure accident. Walking near Plessis-les-Tours one summer evening, along the dyke constructed by our Plantagenets to restrain the inundations of the Loire, I saw a cartroad leading through an avenue of poplars to a Gothic archway. I followed the track and found, lit up by the sunset, a stone mansion of the fifteenth century, neglected and partitioned into the dwellings of four peasant proprietors. The end gable of the upper story was attached by a flying gallery to the ruins of a Gothic church. I was asked if I was looking for the tomb of Ronsard, and told, with a grin, that some learned men had failed to find his grave twenty years earlier, and that I should only waste my time. I thought otherwise. This was evidently St. Cosme. There, was the late-Gothic door, through which Ronsard passed to his death-bed, still decorated with Renaissance carvings of fruits and flowers. A rose-tree grew up one of the jambs, and a vine had thrown a branch across the grey, worm-eaten panels. When I returned the next year the door, with its time-worn sculpture, was gone. But I retrieved parts of it from the wood-heap. The scene echoed the note on which Ronsard harped with poignant insistence

Tout ce qui est de beau ne se garde longtemps
Les roses et les lis ne règnent qu'un printemps.