teenth century. In manner he represented
the fusion of the purely Gallic school of Marot and Rabelais, with the
classical tradition of the Pleiade in its best form. His Alexandrines,
if not quite so vigorous as D'Aubigne's, have all the polish that could
be expected before the administration of Malherbe's rules. His lyric
measures have the boldness and harmony which those rules banished from
French poetry for full seven generations. In matter he displays a
singular mixture of acute observation and philosophic criticism with
ardent sensibility both to pleasure and pain. This, as has been
repeatedly pointed out, is the dominant temper of the French
Renaissance, and though in Regnier it shows something of the melancholy
of the decadence as compared with the springing hope of Rabelais and the
calm maturity of Montaigne, it is scarcely less characteristic.

FOOTNOTES:

[222] Ed. Labitte. Paris, 1869.

[223] Ed. Courbet. Paris, 1875. In this edition some of the dates and
statements in the text, which have been generally accepted, are
contested.

INTERCHAPTER II.

SUMMARY OF RENAISSANCE LITERATURE.

The literary movements of the sixteenth century in France and their
accomplishments--in other words, the course and result of the French
Renaissance--can be traced with greater ease and with more precision
than those of any other age of the literature. The movement is double,
but, unlike most movements, literary and other, it is not sufficiently
described as flux and reflux or action and reaction. The later or
Pleiade half of the century was in no sense a reaction against the first
or Marot-Rabelais half. If there is an appearance of opposition between
the two it is only because, both in Marot and in Rabelais, there was
actually a kind of reaction from the movement which faintly and
imperfectly foreshadowed that of the Pleiade, the _rhetoriqueur_
pedantry of the writers from Chartier to Cretin. In this first half of
the century, while something of a protest was made by Rabelais
explicitly, and implicitly by Marot, against the indiscriminate
Latinising of the French tongue, very much more was done by their
contemporaries, and in a manner by Rabelais himself, in the way of
importing novelties of subject, style, and language, both from ancient
and modern sources. Long before Du Bellay wrote, Calvin had modelled the
first serious and scholarly work of French prose very closely on a Latin
pattern. The translators, with E