their sketches by the
great artists of Italy.

Ronsard, with these qualities of a leader, unconscious, as all true
leaders are, of the causes of his leadership, and caring, as all true
leaders do, for nothing in leadership save the glory it brings with it,
had also, as have all leaders, chiefly the power of drawing in a
multitude of friends. The peculiar head of his own group, he very soon
became the head of all the movement of his day. He had made letters
really great in the minds of his contemporaries, and having so made
them, appeared before them as a master of those letters. Certainly, as I
shall quote him in a moment when I come to his dying speech, he was
"satiated with glory."

Yet this man did not in his personality convey that largeness which was
his principal mark. His face was narrow, long and aquiline; his health
uneven. It was evidently his soul which made men quickly forget the
ill-matched case which bore it; for almost alone of the great poets he
was consistently happy, and there poured out from him not only this
unceasing torrent of verse, but also advice, sustenance, and a kind of
secondary inspiration for others.

In yet another matter he was a leader, and a leader of the utmost
weight, not the cause, perhaps, but certainly the principal example of
the trend which the mind of the nation was taking as the sixteenth
century drew to a close. I mean in the matter of religion, upon whose
colour every society depends, which is the note even of a national
language, and which seems to be the ultimate influence beyond which no
historical analysis can carry a thinking man.

But even those who will not admit the truth of this should watch the
theory closely, for with the religious trend of France is certainly
bound up, and, as I would maintain, on such an influence is dependent,
that ultimate setting of the French classic, that winding up of the
Renaissance, with which I shall deal in the essay upon Malherbe.

The stream of Catholicism was running true. The nation was tumbling back
after a high and turbulent flood into the channel it had scoured for
itself by the unbroken energies of a thousand years. It is no accident
that Ronsard, that Du Bellay, were churchmen. It is a type. It is a type
of the truth that the cloth admitted poets; of the truth that in the
great battle whose results yet trouble Europe, here, on the soil where
the great questions are fought out, Puritanism was already killed. The
epicurean