illed
them.

More than that; in their earnest, and, as it seemed at first, artificial
work, they formed the French language. Some of its most famous and most
familiar words proceed from them--for instance, the word _Patrie_. Some
few of their exotic Greek and Latin adaptations were dropped; the
greater part remained. They have excluded from French--as some think to
the impoverishment of that language--most elements of the Gothic--the
inversion of the adjective, the frequent suppression of the relative,
the irregularity of form, which had survived from the Middle Ages, and
which make the older French poetry so much more sympathetic to the
Englishman than is the new--all these were destroyed by the group of men
of whom I speak. They were called by their contemporaries the Pleiade,
for they were seven stars.

Now, of these, Ronsard was easily the master. He had that power which
our anaemic age can hardly comprehend, of writing, writing, writing,
without fear of exhaustion, without irritability or self-criticism,
without danger of comparing the better with the worse. Five great
volumes of small print, all good--men of that facility never write the
really paltry things--all good, and most of it glorious; some of it on
the level which only the great poets reach here and there. It is in
reading this man who rhymed unceasingly for forty years, who made of
poetry an occupation as well as a glory, and who let it fill the whole
of his life, that one feels how much such creative power has to do with
the value of verse. There is a kind of good humility about it, the
humility of a man who does not look too closely at himself, and the
health of a soul at full stride, going forward. You may open Ronsard at
any page, and find a beauty; you may open any one of the sonnets at
random, and in translating it discover that you are compelled to a fine
English, because he is saying, plainly, great things. And of these
sonnets, note you, he would write thirty at a stretch, and then twenty,
and then a second book, with seventy more. So that as one reads one
cannot help understanding that Italian who said a man was no poet unless
he could rap out a century of sonnets from time to time; and one is
reminded of the general vigour of the age and of the way in which art of
all sorts was mingled up together, when one remembers the tags of
verses, just such verses as these, which are yet to be seen in our
galleries set down doubtfully on the margin of