The sea would have no voice for him—and doubtless had none. ----- Footnote 170: Others call it _Le Quintil Censeur_. It appears not unnecessary to say that “Quintil” has not, and could not have, any reference to “Quintilian,” but refers to the Quintilius of Horace (_Art. Po._, 438). The original edition seems to be very rare: the British Museum only possesses the Lyons reprint (with Sibilet) of 1556. It seems to have been also reprinted with Du Bellay at Versailles in 1878, but this I do not possess. Some make the title _Horatian_ or _Horace_. ----- From such mere “denigration” (the censor permits himself this word as a stone to throw at Du Bellay) no good thing [Sidenote: _Pelletier’s_ Art Poétique.] could come: and besides, for some generation or more, the brother stars were to fight in their courses for Pléiade criticism as well as for Pléiade poetry. The second _Ars Poetica_ of the French Renaissance—the first in any full modern sense—appeared in 1555 from the hand of Jacques Pelletier, himself a spelling reformer, a professor, and, what is more, a mathematician; but a man of versatile ability and much eagerness to welcome any new good thing, with no small power of starting such things. He was a pleasant poet, full of Pléiade manner before the Pléiade had been formed; nor can even his absurd spelling[171] quite hide the beauty of such things as “Alors que la vermeille Aurore.” And when, at the age of nearly forty, he wrote his _Poetic_, nobody could charge him with being a mere theorist. He went heart and soul for the _Pléiade_ ideas, and like Du Bellay and the rest, as indeed was unavoidable, busied himself first of all with the reform of the language. He recommends the formation of a regular poetic diction, and goes so far (I do not say that it is too far) as to approve of retaining double forms, one fully “frenchified,” one simply Latin with a French termination (_e.g._, _repousse_ and _repulse_), the first for prosaic, the second for poetic use. The famous Pléiade stumbling-blocks, the compound epithet and the inverted order of words, are no stumbling-blocks for him—he takes them triumphantly in the stride of his revolutionary ardour: and he joins Ronsard also in the safer if not more popular recommendation of archaism, and of adoption of didactic forms at pleasure. No doubt he is not always wise: though the Classical school which followed had lost the right to reproach him with abusing the principle of suiting the sound to the sense. But still there is a great wisdom in him. Himself an excellent rhymer, he has some of the qualms about rhyme which were so frequent in the sixteenth century; but he is sound on the point (in French not admitting of any serious contest) that without rhyme poetry becomes prose, and he is more than lukewarm as to classical metres. It is sad but not surprising that he joins Du Bellay in condemning the delightful if not all-sufficing metrical kinds which