ublished a _Premier Recueil_, and after them he
produced a third volume of odes, sonnets, etc. All three display the
same peculiarities, and these peculiarities are sufficiently remarkable.
Tahureau was named by the flattery and the classical fancies of his
contemporaries the French Catullus, and the parallel is not so rash as
might be thought. It is true that it came originally from Du Bellay in
one of his satirical veins. But a later poetical critic, Vauquelin de la
Fresnaye, is more precise in his description, and oddly enough uses the
very term which was afterwards applied in England to Shakespeare's
youthful sonnets. Tahureau, he says:--

Nous affrianda tous au sucre de cet art.

The author of the _Mignardises_ is indeed somewhat 'sugared' in his
style of writing; but there are genuine passion and genuine poetical
feeling as well in his verse. Of the minor poets of the time he is
probably the best.

[Sidenote: Minor Ronsardists.]

Before noticing the four remaining poets who have been mentioned as
occupying the highest places next to the Pleiade itself, a brief review
of the minor poets until the end of the century may be given. Etienne de
la Boetie wrote poems which, though they have some of the stiffness and
a little of the hollowness of his _Contre-un,_ possess a certain
grandeur of sentiment and a knack of diction other than commonplace,
which explain Montaigne's admiration. Claude Buttet is chiefly
remarkable for having made a curious attempt to combine the classicism
of the new school with the romanticism of the old. He wrote Sapphics in
rhyme, an idea sufficiently ingenious, but hardly successful. Yet it is
fair to remember that some of the varieties of Leonine verse lacked
neither force nor elegance. The truth is, that these classic metres are
so alien to all modern tongues, that, rhymed or unrhymed, they are
doomed to failure. Jean de la Peruse was, like Magny and Tahureau, a
poet who died before he had reached his term. At twenty-five few men
have left lasting works. Yet La Peruse not only produced a tragedy of
some merit, but minor poems promising more. Jean Doublet was a much
older man, and is chiefly noticeable as an example of the writers who,
beginning with Marot, or even with Cretin, and the Rhetoriqueurs for
models, bowed to the overmastering influence of the Pleiade. Docility of
this kind, however, rarely promises much poetical worth, and Doublet was
not a great poet; but his poems, which