popularity returned in full measure, and
for two centuries he was the one French poet before the classical period
who was actually read and admired with genuine admiration by others
besides professed students of antiquity. Since the great revival of the
taste for older literature, which preceded and accompanied the Romantic
movement, Marot has scarcely held this pride of place. The Pleiade on
the one hand, the purely mediaeval writers on the other, have pushed him
from his stool. But sane criticism, which declines to depreciate one
thing because it appreciates another, will always have hearty admiration
for his urbanity, his genuine wit, his graceful turn of words; and his
flashes of pathos and poetry.

It is, as has been said, one of the commonplaces of the subject to speak
of Marot as the father of modern French poetry; the phrase is, like all
such phrases, inaccurate, but, like most such phrases, it contains a
certain amount of truth. To the characteristics of the lighter French
poetry, from La Fontaine to Beranger, which has always been more popular
both at home and abroad than the more ambitious and serious efforts of
French poets, Marot does in some sort stand in a parental relation. He
retained the sprightliness and sly fun of the Fabliau-writers, while he
softened their crudity of expression, he exchanged clumsiness and
horse-play for the play of wit, and he emphasised fully in the language
the two characteristics which have never failed to distinguish it since,
elegance and urbanity. His style is somewhat pedestrian, though on
occasion he can write with exquisite tenderness, and with the most
delicate suggestiveness of expression. But as a rule he does not go
deep; ease and grace, not passion or lofty flights, are his strong
points. Representing, as he did, the reaction from the stiff forms and
clumsily classical language of the _rhetoriqueurs_, it was not likely
that he should exhibit the tendency of his own age to classical culture
and imitation very strongly. He and his school were thus regarded by
their immediate successors of the Pleiade as rustic and uncouth singers,
for the most part very unjustly. But still Marot's work was of less
general and far-reaching importance than that of Ronsard. He brought out
the best aspect of the older French literature, and cleared away some
disfiguring encumbrances from it, but he imported nothing new. It would
hardly be unjust to say that, given the difference of a centu