apparel tricking a fair body. We may reflect that novels, the typical product of our own literature, will suffer just such an eclipse as the lyrics of the sixteenth century. They, too, are voluminous. Their enthusiastic references to an Age of Invention, to railways and motor cars, will some day seem no less superfluous than Renaissance references to an Age of Learning, to Apollo and the muses. Yet things of beauty outlast their contemporary trappings; and even these at first a zest, then a bore— become in the end a curiosity, not without charm. The mythology of Ronsard, though faded, has a vague decorative value, as of old tapestry. Turning to strictures on Ronsard's diction: it is true that he preserved some medieval terms. 'Spenser in affecting the ancients writ no language,' was Ben Jonson's condemnation of a like accident in the Faery Queen. Censure of that kind is the common form' of seventeenth-century criticism on sixteenth-century romance, and should carry but little weight with us who live after the romantic revival. It is true, again, that Ronsard did not reject homely words from high-flown periods. He writes of chemises' and 'chandelles'; things abhorrent to the fastidious pomp of 'Le Roi Soleil,' whose court poets found nothing amiss in a Ramillies wig on the head of a Greek god. L'Abbé de Marolles, in 1675, writes-of a rose ! Au moment que j'en parle, on voit que sa perruque A wig could never be out of place in the eyes of Ronsard's detractors. But candles were too common. The compatriots of Shakespeare who read, with no shock but of joy,— Though not so bright As those gold candles fix'd in heaven's air need not boggle at Ronsard's 'chandelles.' So, too, with some of his neologisms; in our ignorance as foreigners we may even regret that his 'myrteux and 'frétillard' are obsolete in French. As for his diminutives, I deny that Ronsard invented them. He took them from old French songs. In these, the pensive lover 'par ung matinet,' in the shadow of a 'buyssonnet' is left 'tout seullet' by 'le doux roussignolet' (Chansons du XVe Siècle, Gaston Paris). Jehannot de Lescurel (French Lyrics, Saintsbury) has 'doucette, savoureusette, joliette, bellette, jeunette,' and so on, with a relishing frequency to which Ronsard never approached. Mythological machinery-archaisms, colloquialisms, neologisms-caressing diminutives these were but trivial excrescences on a rich style; in its staple ever fresh and forthright, striking, and sonorous. Ronsard's immediate successors, who kicked at his renown, paraded these excrescences to justify their apostasy, and then annexed his goods under cover of the derision they had provoked. They ignored the true characteristics of his art; but they did not neglect them. Disguising their debt, they took all they could carry; and that was enough to furnish their stock-in-trade. Excepting the Drama, every mode of poetic expression exhibited by French 'classic' authors is, in so far as form is concerned, to be found in Ronsard, with much else of value which they did not appraise. The French classic was disengaged from the labyrinth of the Pléiade's production. According to Brunetière, Ronsard's sentiment for the harmonies of the French language has never been equalled. He invented, or brought G into favour, all the combinations of rhythms and metres of which French is capable. All his inventions have not been adopted, but no new ones have been made. He determined the essential types of French lyrics, and fixed the model not only of the Classic, but even of the Romantic ode. His Discours gave eloquence a place for ever in French poetry. These were his lasting contributions to art, and the wealth of them has not, even now, been exhausted. The Pléiade called into being a paradise, almost a wilderness of beauty; florid,—I cannot deny it,-intricate and luxuriant in its growth, flaunting its profusion, mad as midsummer is mad: and in the midst they planted a tree of knowledge. Their successors, having tasted of that tree, set to work with axe and bill on the wilderness, lopping it into a formal garden and, at last, turning it into a public place. Their rules, as Mallarmé suggests, will enable anybody to make, with certainty, a verse to which nobody can object. But that savours of deportment rather than of poesy. It enjoins a sacrifice of distinction to avoid a charge of eccentricity; an admirable maxim for any who pursue a respectable calling along a crowded thoroughfare, for the genteel mob of eighteenth-century couplet-mongers, but a useless counsel and, so, an impertinence to the leader of a revel or a forlorn hope. The poets of the French romantic revival were leaders in both capacities, and they threw these restraints to the winds. They took Ronsard for their Bible, and, as Théophile Gautier puts it, burned to go forth and combat l'hydre du Perruquinisme.' The 'wiggery '-the pomp and punctilio of 'classic' artifice are now being relinquished, though reluctantly, and, so to say, against the grain, by the wooden compilers of literary manuals. Thus it stands with the Pléiade's influence on the French language and French poetry. I have but one other question to propound. What effect did the Pléiade work, by example or precept, on the remaking of the English language and of English poetry? What degree of influence did they exert on our own Elizabethan revival? The judgment has stood that their influence was of the slightest ; but I ask for a stay of execution and more evidence. Is it certain that our late sixteenth-century poets drew so much of their inspiration from Italy, and so little of it from France? Mr. Sidney Lee (Elizabethan Sonnets, 1904) has impugned, has, indeed, traversed that judgment. He based his finding on the materials conveniently collected by Edward Arber in his invaluable reprints. These should be examined more exhaustively with a less exclusive attention to the sonnet: and who will say that MSS., and odd volumes in old libraries, which only in 1895 rendered up four lost pearls of Thomas Watson's poetry, do not entice to many another adventure of the diver'? The argument may be stated thus: Italian models had been extant since Petrarch, who lived far into the life of Chaucer. Wyat and Surrey, who turned to these Italian models in the earlier years of the sixteenth century, failed to assimilate them, and did little in the way either of remaking the English language or reviving lyrics. The poets who effected these objects for England, as the Pléiade had effected them for France, praised and dismissed Surrey and Wyat, the courtly makers,' just as Ronsard had bowed out his precursors of François I.'s court. But they were familiar alike with the Pléiade's practice and with their preaching. They proceeded 6 to the study of Italian from a knowledge of French, and received Italian poetry through the medium of French art. Thus transmuted it could be assimilated, and this was done by English poets, who echo the music of the Pléiade's verse and repeat its critical conclusions in literary manifestoes. Take the condition of English lyrics during the last ten years of Henri II.'s reign, the glittering and august decade of the Pléiade in its prime, which it fulfilled with infinitely varied lyric forms; with thousands of sonnets easily written on the Petrarchan model; and let it be noted - with critical manifestoes of sedulous ingenuity. What had we then in England? Tottel's Miscellany of 1557. Will any one contend that even the verse of Surrey and Wyat, great though its merit be, is comparable in volume, variety, clarity, and assurance to the verse of the Pléiade? No; Surrey and Wyat grope after Italian models which could not be wholly assimilated even by them. The other authors included in that collection are mostly-except Lord Vaux-reminiscent of country catches and the 'canter canter' of fourteen-syllabled lines. Our lyrics, stately or melodious, come much later. Tottel's Miscellany, Douglas's Virgil (1553), Drant's Horace (1566), Turberville's Ovid (1569), reprints even of Piers the Plowman's Vision (1551, 1561), archaic alike in language and poetic form, comprise, with the racy doggerel of Skelton and the somnolences of Stephen Hawes, all the recent English verse which Spenser had to read as a boy. Spenser was born in 1552. It is not, therefore, strange, but it is significant, to find Spenser in 1569, aged seventeen, translating Du Bellay's Vision. But Take, again, the Epistle prefixed to Spenser's early |