lt that he was bringing back to her the true flavour of her early days
in the court of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exotic Italian
gaieties. Those who disliked that poetry, disliked it because they found
that age itself distasteful. The poetry of Malherbe came, with its
sustained style and weighty sentiment, but with nothing that set people
singing; and the lovers of such poetry saw in the poetry of the Pleiad
only the latest trumpery of the middle age. But the time came also when
the school of Malherbe had had its day; and the Romanticists, who in
their eagerness for excitement, for strange music and imagery, went back
to the works of the middle age, accepted the Pleiad too with the rest;
and in that new middle age which their genius has evoked, the poetry of
the Pleiad has found its place. At first, with Malherbe, you may find
it, like the architecture, the whole mode of life, the very dresses of
that time, fantastic, faded, rococo. But if you look long enough to
understand it, to conceive its sentiment, you will find that those
wanton lines have a spirit guiding their caprices. For there is style
there; one temper has shaped the whole; and everything that has style,
that has been done as no other man or age could have done it, as it
could never, for all our trying, be done again, has its true value and
interest. Let us dwell upon it for a moment, and try to gather from it
that special flower, ce fleur particulier, which Ronsard himself tells
us every garden has.

It is poetry not for the people, but for a confined circle, for
courtiers, great lords and erudite persons, people who desire to be
humoured, to gratify a certain refined voluptuousness they have in them.
Ronsard loves, or dreams that he loves, a rare and peculiar type of
beauty, la petite pucelle Angevine, with golden hair and dark eyes. But
he has the ambition not only of being a courtier and a lover, but a
great scholar also; he is anxious about orthography, about the letter e
Grecque, the true spelling of Latin names in French writing, and the
restoration of the letter i to its primitive liberty--del' i voyelle en
sa premiere liberte. His poetry is full of quaint, remote learning. He
is just a little pedantic, true always to his own express judgment, that
to be natural is not enough for one who in poetry desires to produce
work worthy of immortality. And therewithal a certain number of Greek
words, which charmed Ronsard and his circle by their gaiety