were, of a poet addressing his contemporaries on public matters,
the utterances of a patriot and a citizen moved by pity for his fellows,
such poetry as the _Discours des Miseres de ce Temps_ and the
_Institution pour l'Adolescence du Roi, Charles IX._, Ronsard is
original and impressive, a forerunner of the orator poets of the
seventeenth century. His eclogues show a true feeling for external
nature, touched at times by a tender sadness. When he escapes from
the curiosities and the strain of his less happy Petrarchism, he is
an admirable poet of love in song and sonnet; no more beautiful
variation on the theme of "gather the rosebuds while ye may" exists
than his sonnet _Quand vous serez bien vieille_, unless it be his
dainty ode _Mignonne, allons voir si la Rose_. Passionate in the
deepest and largest sense Ronsard is not; but it was much to be sincere
and tender, to observe just measure, to render a subtle phase of
emotion. In the fine melancholy of his elegiac poetry he is almost
modern. Before all else he is a master of his instrument, an inventor
of new effects and movements of the lyre; in his hands the entire
rhythmical system was renewed or was purified. His dexterity in
various metres was that of a great virtuoso, and it was not the mere
dexterity which conquers difficulties, it was a skill inspired and
sustained by the sentiment of metre.

Of the other members of the Pleiade, one--Jodelle--is remembered
chiefly in connection with the history of the drama. Baif (1532-89),
son of the French ambassador at Venice, translated from Sophocles
and Terence, imitated Plautus, Petrarchised in sonnets, took from
Virgil's Georgics the inspiration of his _Meteores_, was guided by
the Anacreontic poems in his _Passe-Temps_, and would fain rival
Theognis in his most original work _Les Mimes_, where a moral or
satiric meaning masks behind an allegory or a fable. He desired to
connect poetry more closely with music, and with this end in view
thought to reform the spelling of words and to revive the quantitative
metrical system of classical verse.[2] REMI BELLEAU (1528-77)
practised the Horatian ode and the sonnet; translated Anacreon;
followed the Neapolitan Sannazaro in his _Bergerie_ of connected
prose and verse, where the shepherds are persons of distinction
arrayed in a pastoral disguise; and adapted the mediaeval _lapidary_
(with imitations of the pseudo-Orpheus) to the taste of the
Renaissance in his _Amours et Nouveaux