nd of
classical example, the gliding from couplet to couplet without a pause.
"The alexandrine holds in our language the place of heroic verse among
the Greeks and Romans"--in this statement is indicated the chief
service rendered to French poetry by Ronsard and the rest of the
Pleiade; they it was who, by their teaching and example, imposed on
later writers that majestic line, possessing the most varied powers,
capable of the finest achievements, which has yielded itself alike
to the purposes of Racine and to those of Victor Hugo.

Ronsard and Du Bellay broke with the tradition of the Middle Ages,
and inaugurated the French classical school; it remained for Malherbe,
at a later date, to reform the reformation of the Pleiade, and to
win for himself the glory which properly belongs to his predecessors.
Unfortunately from its origin the French classical school had in it
the spirit of an intellectual aristocracy, which removed it from
popular sympathies; unfortunately, also, the poets of the Pleiade
failed to perceive that the masterpieces of Greece and Rome are
admirable, not because they belong to antiquity, but because they
are founded on the imitation of nature and on ideas of the reason.
They were regarded as authorities equal with nature or independent
of it; and thus while the school of Ronsard did much to renew literary
art, its teaching involved an error which eventually tended to the
sterilisation of art. That error found its correction in the
literature of the seventeenth century, and expressly in the doctrine
set forth by Boileau; yet under the correction some of the
consequences of the error remained. Ronsard and his followers, on
the other hand, never made the assumption, common enough in the
seventeenth century, that poetry could be manufactured by observance
of the rules, nor did they suppose that the total play of emotion
must be rationalised by the understanding; they left a place for the
instinctive movements of poetic sensibility.

During forty years Ronsard remained the "Prince of Poets." Tasso
sought his advice; the Chancellor Michel de l'Hospital wrote in his
praise; Brantome placed him above Petrarch; Queen Elizabeth and Mary
Stuart sent him gifts; Charles IX. on one occasion invited him to
sit beside the throne. In his last hours he was still occupied with
his art. His death, at the close of 1585, was felt as a national
calamity, and pompous honours were awarded to his tomb. Yet Ronsard,
though