writers of Europe a homely vocabulary and, with free allowance for the grace of idiom, a Latin style. Widening Language. But thought had expanded, its materials had multiplied, and the common language of the people nowhere sufficed for full expression. Each speaker and writer in one generation has a vocabulary differing in some respects from that of any of his neighbours. The most cultivated Englishman does not use a fifth of the words catalogued in a full English dictionary. A few hundred words suffice for all the needs of speech in an uneducated man, and a fairly educated man will go through life with a few thousand. More wealth of words is wanted for the expression of more wealth of thought; and this need caused men in Elizabeth's reign to attempt the recovery of old words passing out of use, and the invention of new words, derived chiefly from Greek or Latin. Evidence of this abounds in the work of English writers throughout the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth and the reign of James I., but the change proceeds almost insensibly by effort somewhere to supply each want when it is felt. In France there was a definite attempt in this direction, and a foremost poet had been leader of the band of authors who endeavoured to enrich the word-store of French literature and to mend its style, by making it conform more closely to the standard of a classical Augustan age. Thus, while Italian influence was paramount in Western Europe, the foundations of French. influence were being laid. France aims at the ideal. We shall find again and again in this history that in France, if anywhere, prevailing forms of thought first crystallise into some clearly defined system to which men seek to refer their speculations, and by which they seek to shape action. There is a weak side, no doubt, to the idealist's intolerance of a conception imperfectly expressed, or burdened with details that blur its outline; but as the brave idealist, France has a place of her own—a noble place--in the modern history of progress. She has suffered often for the common good, and she has made, in small things as in great, experiments towards perfection that have been instructive even when they failed. Our English classicism under Elizabeth owed something to France. It had among its vital forces impulse from the classical idealism of Ronsard. Ronsard. Pierre de Ronsard died on the twenty-seventh of December, 1585, aged sixty-one years and three or four months. He was of a noble French family which had its remote origin from where the Danube runs nearest to Thrace. Out of service of a king's son at the Court of France, Ronsard passed, as a boy, into Scotland, in May, 1537, as page to James V., after his marriage on New Year's Day to the sixteen-year-old consumptive princess Magdalene, who died in the following July. Young Ronsard was for about two years at the Court of Scotland. He was there in June, 1538, when James V. married Mary of Guise, and he lived afterwards for six months in England. On his return to France, Pierre de Ronsard resumed his office of page in the service of the Duke of Orleans, after whose death he was transferred to the household of Prince Henry, who in 1547, as Henry II., succeeded Francis I. upon the throne of France. Ronsard was but a boy of sixteen when he went to Germany in the train of Lazare de Baïf, ambassador to Spires. There he learnt German, and had an illness that left him for the rest of his life deaf. Du Bellay also was deaf. Deafness disqualified Ronsard for a courtier's life, and combined with the influence of a scholarly companion to direct Ronsard towards the full use of his mind. He fastened vigorously upon Virgil, and learnt all Virgil by heart. He studied the Roman de la Rose and the works of Clement Marot. He went to the schools again in 1543, and after his father's death, in June, 1544, Ronsard placed himself under the tuition of the learned Jean Dorat, who was also deaf. Dorat taught Greek at the Collége de Coqueret to the son of Lazare de Baïf, Jean Antoine de Baïf, who was the first writer of French verse in the metres of the Greeks and Latins. Ronsard's enthusiasm for Greek poetry was roused by the reading with Dorat of the "Prometheus Bound." He translated it into French, and then, passing from Æschylus to Aristophanes, translated the "Plutus." It was acted in the college theatre, and was the first acted comedy in French. Ronsard passed on with Jean Dorat to Homer and Pindar, and worked hard at the obscure "Cassandra" of Lycophron, one of the seven poets who, in the third century before Christ, in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, were called the Pleiades. The name was presently revived in France for application to Ronsard and six of his companions. Pierre de Ronsard, in his own verse, began early to work definitely for the enrichment of the language of his country, by restoring old words to their proper use and by inventing new, which he took from other languages and fashioned in the manner of the Greeks.* He modelled his style first upon Horace, then upon Pindar. He entered into close companionship of study with Antoine de Baïf and Joachim du Bellay. They who were not of the league laughed at the learned obscurities of Ronsard's "Pindarising." But Ronsard made his mark upon his time. His influence was felt by those poets in England who were aiming at the elevation of our literature by imitation of the Greeks and Latins. When, in his latter days, he was heavily afflicted not only with deafness but with gout, Queen Elizabeth herself was among Ronsard's readers and admirers. Mary Queen of Scots, in 1583, two or three years before his death and four years before her own, sent to him by the hands of the Sieur de Nauson, her * "E. W." i. Introd. 57, 58. place in the modern history of progress. She has suffered often for the common good, and she has made, in small things as in great, experiments towards perfection that have been instructive even when they failed. Our English classicism under Elizabeth owed something to France. It had among its vital forces impulse from the classical idealism of Ronsard. Ronsard. Pierre de Ronsard died on the twenty-seventh of December, 1585, aged sixty-one years and three or four months. He was of a noble French family which had its remote origin from where the Danube runs nearest to Thrace. Out of service of a king's son at the Court of France, Ronsard passed, as a boy, into Scotland, in May, 1537, as page to James V., after his marriage on New Year's Day to the sixteen-year-old consumptive princess Magdalene, who died in the following July. Young Ronsard was for about two years at the Court of Scotland. He was there in June, 1538, when James V. married Mary of Guise, and he lived afterwards for six months in England. On his return to France, Pierre de Ronsard resumed his office of page in the service of the Duke of Orleans, after whose death he was transferred to the household of Prince Henry, who in 1547, as Henry II., succeeded Francis I. upon the throne of France. Ronsard was but a boy of sixteen when he went to Germany in the train of Lazare de Baïf, ambassador to Spires. There he learnt German, and had an illness that left him for the rest of his life deaf. Du Bellay also was deaf. Deafness disqualified Ronsard for a courtier's life, and combined with the influence of a scholarly companion to direct Ronsard towards the full use of his mind. He fastened vigorously upon Virgil, and learnt all Virgil by heart. He studied the Roman de la Rose and the works of Clement Marot. He went to the schools again in 1543, and after his father's death, in June, 1544, Ronsard placed himself under the desired would not be reached at all by the way these friends of his had chosen as the straightest. The larger life of our Elizabethan literature began about the time when Shakespeare, a youth of twenty-two, first came to London-possibly in 1586; when Marlowe, in this year or in 1587, produced his first play, "Tamburlaine," and in its prologue, not uninfluenced by these arguments at his university, openly turned away "from jigging veins of rhyming mother wits." But Marlowe set aside the search for reconcilement of our English verse with Greek or Latin rules of quantity. It was he who took the iambic measure of our undeveloped blank verse, and began to shape it into what it afterwards became. The expansion of our literature after 1586 soon set at rest the questioning upon which William Webbe, in the summer evenings Webbe. of the year 1586, was occupied when he wrote, William at the manor house of Flemyngs in Essex, in the parish of Runwell and ten miles from Chelmsford, "A Discourse of English Poetrie: Together with the Authors judgment touching the reformation of our English Verse. By VVilliam VVebbe, Graduate. Imprinted at London, by John Charlewood for Robert VValley. 1586."* William Webbe was a Cambridge man-probably the William Webbe of St. John's College who graduated as Bachelor of Arts in 1573, for he was at Cambridge with Spenser and Gabriel Harvey. He was a friend also of Robert Wilmot, one of the five authors of the play of "Tancred and Gismunda," first acted before the queen at the Inner Temple in 1568. Young Webbe was then present at the performance, and Wilmot afterwards revised, and published the play, as by himself alone, in 1592, at which date we shall come to it again. Wilmot was presented, in 1582, by Gabriel Poyntz * This was edited and published for a shilling by Professor Arber in 1870 in his "English Reprints," from the copy among the Malone books in the Bodleian, one of the only two known to be extant. |