cur to this storehouse may find the withal to equip themselves. That
the vocabulary has been enormously if somewhat indiscriminately
increased, means that writers in the future, at whatever loss they may
be for thought, need certainly be at no loss for words to express it.
But the gain is greater even than this. Not merely have the glossary,
the grammar, the prosody of the language been enriched, but entirely
new moulds in which literary work can be cast have been added to the
literature. The form of drama in which France was to achieve, with but
little formal alteration, some of her greatest literary triumphs, has
been discovered and acclimatised; the essay has become a recognised
thing; attempts at history proper as distinct from mere annals and
chronicles have been made. Literature, in short, is organised, and
literary labour works in matter roughly at least prepared and shaped.
One of the greatest drawbacks of mediaeval literature, the confusion of
styles, the handling of science in verse, of theology in terms taken
from amatory romances, of politics in 'dreams,' of social satire in
clumsy allegories, is cleared away. The form most suitable for every
kind of literary work has been more or less made clear to the literary
workman, and a plentiful supply of material in the shape of vocabulary
is at his disposal.

That this great accomplishment is on the whole the doing of the Pleiade
in its larger sense, as designating and including the men of letters of
1550-1600, no impartial student of the period can doubt. But at the same
time there is no doubt either that their work was both incomplete and in
some respects open to grave objection. They had, like all reformers,
literary as well as political, neglected to preserve the historical
continuity, and deliberately turned their backs on the traditions of the
language and the literature. Their importations and imitations had been
sometimes unnecessary, sometimes awkward, sometimes absurd. The mass of
their contributions required examination, arrangement, and no doubt in
some cases rejection. Moreover, they had on the whole concentrated their
attention too much upon poetry; prose, the less exquisite but the more
useful instrument, had been comparatively neglected. Almost all styles
had been tried in it, but no general style nor the conditions of any had
been elaborated. In drama much remained to be done. The model was there
in the rough, but the workmen had been unskilful, and