. From the boudoir of Diane de
Poitiers, the faithless muse of the poet passed to that of Marguerite de
Valois, a dangerous favor that Marot paid for by imprisonment. Almost
at the same epoch another Bohemian, whose childhood on the shores of
Sorrento had been caressed by the kisses of an epic muse, Tasso, entered
the court of the Duke of Ferrara as Marot had that of Francis I. But
less fortunate than the lover of Diane and Marguerite, the author of
"Jerusalem Delivered" paid with his reason and the loss of his genius
the audacity of his love for a daughter of the house of Este.

The religious contests and political storms that marked the arrival of
Medicis in France did not check the soaring flight of art. At the moment
when a ball struck on the scaffold of the Fontaine des Innocents Jean
Goujon who had found the Pagan chisel of Phidias, Ronsard discovered the
lyre of Pindar and founded, aided by his pleiad, the great French lyric
school. To this school succeeded the reaction of Malherbe and his
fellows, who sought to drive from the French tongue all the exotic
graces that their predecessors had tried to nationalize on Parnassus. It
was a Bohemian, Mathurin Regnier, who was one of the last defenders of
the bulwarks of poetry, assailed by the phalanx of rhetoricians and
grammarians who declared Rabelais barbarous and Montaigne obscure. It
was this same cynic, Mathurin Regnier, who, adding fresh knots to the
satiric whip of Horace, exclaimed, in indignation at the manners of his
day, "Honor is an old saint past praying to."

The roll call of Bohemia during the seventeenth century contains a
portion of the names belonging to the literature of the reigns of Louis
XIII and Louis XIV, it reckons members amongst the wits of the Hotel
Rambouillet, where it takes its share in the production of the
"Guirlande de Julie," it has its entries into the Palais Cardinal, where
it collaborates, in the tragedy of "Marianne," with the poet-minister
who was the Robespierre of the monarchy. It bestrews the couch of Marion
Delorme with madrigals, and woos Ninon de l'Enclos beneath the trees of
the Place Royal; it breakfasts in the morning at the tavern of the
Goinfres or the Epee Royale, and sups in the evening at the table of the
Duc de Joyeuse; it fights duels under a street lamp for the sonnet of
Urania against the sonnet of Job. Bohemia makes love, war, and even
diplomacy, and in its old days, weary of adventures, it turns the Old
and N