syllable has to give its
quota to the effect of the line as well as every line its quota to the
effect of the stanza. But whether it was this or something else, the
effect is indisputable. To this must be added a liberal, though in
Ronsard's own case not excessive, importation of new words from Greek
and Latin, a bold and striking mode of expression, the retention of many
picturesque old words which the senseless folly of the
seventeenth-century reformers banished, and, above all, a great
indulgence in diminutives, which give a most charming effect to the
lighter verse of Ronsard and his friends, and which also were cut off by
the indiscriminate and 'desperate hook' of Malherbe and Boileau. So
great were the formal changes and improvements thus introduced, that
French poetry takes a new colour from the age of Ronsard, a colour which
in its moments of health it has ever since displayed.

[Sidenote: Du Bellay.]

Next to Ronsard, and perhaps above him, if uniform excellence rather
than bulk and range of work is considered, ranks Joachim du Bellay[195].
He was a connection, though it does not seem quite clear what
connection, of the Cardinal du Bellay to whom Rabelais was so long
attached, and whose house included other illustrious members. Probably
he was a cousin of the cardinal and of his two brothers the memoir
writers. His youth was rendered troublesome by illness and law
difficulties, but at last he was able with Ronsard, whose junior he was
by a little, to give himself up to study under Daurat. His prose
manifesto has already been dealt with, and almost immediately afterwards
he in some sort anticipated Ronsard's poetical carrying out of his
principles by a volume of _Sonnets to Olive_, the anagram of a certain
Mademoiselle de Viole. The sonnet, however, was not such an absolute
novelty as the ode, having been introduced already by Mellin de Saint
Gelais. Shortly afterwards he went to Italy with the Cardinal du Bellay,
a proceeding which did not bring him good luck. The intriguing diplomacy
of the papal court displeased him, and he soon lost his cousin's favour.
A volume of sonnets entitled _Regrets_, full of vigour and poetry, dates
from this time. But Du Bellay, deprived of the protection of the most
powerful member of his family, again fell into difficulties, and finally
died in 1560 at the age of thirty-five. His Roman sojourn has given
birth to perhaps the finest of his works, _Les Antiquites de Rome_,
Englis