had produced such charming things from Lescurel to Villon; and he duly recommends comedy, tragedy, and epic in their place. As he had himself translated the _Epistle to the Pisos_ eleven years earlier, it is not wonderful that he sticks very close to it. Whether, as has been said by some, he does not know Aristotle, may not be quite certain; but it is certain that Aristotelian doctrines make no figure in him: it will be remembered that they had not made much even in Italy at this time. In fact, it seems reasonable to doubt whether, despite their adoration of Greek, the Pléiade writers ever drew much direct inspiration from the _Poetics_, though, in Italian translations and commentaries at least, it must have influenced them to some extent. ----- Footnote 171: “Vermeille” with him is “vermeilhæ”; “voix,” “voès”; “neigeux,” “negeus”; Lucan, “Lukein,” &c. ----- The most interesting figure of Pléiade criticism, however, is, as it should be, Ronsard[172] himself. [Sidenote: _Ronsard: his general importance._] The greatness of this really great poet must be injuriously affected, but ought not to be obscured to critical judgment, both by the fact (for which he is to blame) that he tried too many things and wrote too much; and by the other fact (for which he is blameless) that he attempted a new theory and practice of poetry, not, like his younger and more fortunate contemporary Spenser, at the beginning of a great poetic wave in his own country, but at a time when that country’s energies were steadily settling towards prose. Yet he was nothing if not critical. The actual amount of critical expression that he has left us is not large: it is a pity that he did not devote to it some of the time which he might well have spared from his too copious, and sometimes too undistinguished, versemanship. He is, like Dryden (whom he resembles in not a few ways so much that I should be surprised if the parallel has not struck others), somewhat careless of outward consistency in his critical utterances—a carelessness indicative in each case of real critical sincerity, of the fact that the two poets were honestly seeking the way, and had the sense not to persevere in blind alleys when they found them blind. Above all, like the whole of his school, he is distinguished by a critical note, which must be dwelt on in the Interchapter succeeding this book, but which may well be indicated here—the note that they are much more bent on the production of new literature than on the study of old. ----- Footnote 172: _Œuvres Complètes_, ed. Blanchemain, 8 vols., Paris, 1857-1867. They are not quite “complete,” but the omissions (which may be found, if anybody wants them, in such respectable works as the _Cabinet Satirique_ &c.) fortunately do not concern _us_. -----