, and
including Daurat, became the constellation of the Pleiade. The seven
associates read together, translated and imitated the classics; a
common doctrine of art banded them in unity; they thought scorn of
the vulgar ways of popular verse; poetry for them was an arduous and
exquisite toil; its service was a religion. At length, in 1549, they
flung out their manifesto--the _Defense et Illustration de la Langue
Francaise_ by Du Bellay, the most important study in literary
criticism of the century. With this should be considered, as less
important manifestoes, the later _Art Poetique_ of Ronsard, and his
prefaces to the _Franciade_. To formulate principles is not always
to the advantage of a movement in literature; but champions need a
banner, reformers can hardly dispense with a definite creed. Against
the popular conception of the ignorant the Pleiade maintained that
poetry was a high and difficult form of art; against the pedantry
of humanism they maintained that the native tongue of France admitted
of literary art worthy to take its place beside that of Greece or
Rome. The French literary vocabulary, they declared, has excellences
of its own, but it needs to be enriched by technical terms, by words
of local dialects, by prudent adoptions from Greek and Latin, by
judicious developments of the existing families of words, by the
recovery of words that have fallen into disuse.

It is unjust to the Pleiade to say that they aimed at overloading
poetic diction with neologisms of classical origin; they sought to
innovate with discretion; but they unquestionably aimed at the
formation of a poetic diction distinct from that of prose; they turned
away from simplicity of speech to ingenious periphrasis; they desired
a select, aristocratic idiom for the service of verse; they
recommended a special syntax in imitation of the Latin; for the elder
forms of French poetry they would substitute reproductions or
re-creations of classical forms. Rondeaux, ballades, virelais,
chants royaux, chansons are to be cast aside as _epiceries_; and their
place is to be taken by odes like those of Pindar or of Horace, by
the elegy, satire, epigram, epic, or by newer forms justified by the
practice of Italian masters. Rich but not over-curious rhymes are
to be cultivated, with in general the alternation of masculine and
feminine rhymes; the caesura is to fall in accordance with the meaning.
Ronsard, more liberal than Du Bellay, permits, on the grou