thout whom the far greater Montaigne could hardly have been.
The influence of Amyot on French literary history is wider in reach and
longer in duration than we thus indicate; but Montaigne's indebtedness
to him is alone enough to prove that a mere translator had in this man
made a very important contribution to the forming prose literature of
France.

"The Pleiades," so called, were a group of seven writers, who, about the
middle of the sixteenth century, banded themselves together in France,
with the express aim of supplying influential example to improve the
French language for literary purposes. Their peculiar appellation, "The
Pleiades," was copied from that of a somewhat similar group of Greek
writers, that existed in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Of course,
the implied allusion in it is to the constellation of the Pleiades. The
individual name by which the Pleiades of the sixteenth century may best
be remembered is that of Ronsard the poet, associated with the romantic
and pathetic memory of Mary, Queen of Scots. Never, perhaps, in the
history of letters was the fame of a poet in the poet's own lifetime
more universal and more splendid than was the fame of Ronsard. A high
court of literary judicature formally decreed to Ronsard the title of
The French Poet by eminence. This occurred in the youth of the poet. The
wine of success so brilliant turned the young fellow's head. He soon
began to play lord paramount of Parnassus, with every air of one born to
the purple. The kings of the earth vied with each other to do him honor.
Ronsard affected scholarship, and the foremost scholars of his time were
proud to place him with Homer and with Virgil on the roll of the poets.
Ronsard's peculiarity in style was the free use of words and
constructions not properly French. Boileau indicated whence he enriched
his vocabulary and his syntax, by satirically saying that Ronsard spoke
Greek and Latin in French. At his death, Ronsard was almost literally
buried under praises. Sainte-Beuve strikingly says that he seemed to go
forward into posterity as into a temple.

Sharp posthumous reprisals awaited the extravagant fame of Ronsard.
Malherbe, coming in the next generation, legislator of Parnassus,
laughed the literary pretensions of Ronsard to scorn. This stern critic
of form, such is the story, marked up his copy of Ronsard with notes of
censure so many, that a friend of his, seeing the annotated volume,
observed, "What here is