It may have been in part payment of this promise that he wrote the Prefatory matter to the _Franciade_.[177] [Sidenote: _The_ Prefaces to the Franciade.] This, which, as it stands in the modern editions, is triform, consists of a short Preface (or _Au Lecteur_) in prose, from the master’s own hand, to the original edition; of a verse exordium, or rather Introduction, separate from the poem proper; and, between the two, of a second Preface or _Treatise on Heroic Poetry_ of some length, which we have, not as it left the author’s pen, but arranged and revised (it is said under his direction) by Claude Binet. The critical interest of the verse Proem lies in the enthusiastic glorification of Homer and Virgil (who have shown the whole secret of epic-writing, and whose work the author bids his own “adore on its knees”), and in a spirited reissue of the cardinal doctrine of the _Pléiade_ that French is a fertile soil, all overgrown and untilled, which must be brought under cultivation by the unsparing labour of poets and scholars. ----- Footnote 177: _Ed. cit._, iii. 7-39. ----- The first Preface begins with the time-honoured comparison, or contrast, between History and Poetry, as dealing, the one with verity, the other with verisimilitude. Hence Ronsard strikes off to set Homer and Virgil far above all others, and to fix a stigma on Ariosto as presenting a body handsome enough in members, but so counterfeit and monstrous as a whole that it is like an unwholesome dream. He has evidently on his mind the objections, perhaps of the ancients, perhaps of some Italians, to the combination of historical poetry, and endeavours to meet the objection that he comes nearer to actual history “than Virgilian art permits” by the rather perilous excuse that Virgil only lived under a _second_ emperor, while he himself lives under the successor of a long line of kings, and that Charles our Lord and King insisted on no invidious preference being shown to some of his ancestors over the others. Indeed Ronsard is too typical a Frenchman for a sense of humour to be exactly his strong point. He then proceeds to name, as his example, rather “the naïve facility of Homer than the curious diligence of Virgil”: though he ventures to reprehend some excess of improbability in the scheme and details of the _Iliad_, and ends with some particulars of apology and explanation. The most curious of these are a passage giving reasons (by no means in strict accordance with the sentence referred to above) for rejecting the Alexandrine in favour of the decasyllable, and a pathetic appeal to the reader _not_ to read his poem like an official document,[178] but to accommodate his voice to its passion, and especially to raise that voice whenever he comes to a mark of exclamation. ----- Footnote 178: _Plustost à la façon d’une missive, ou de quelques lettres royaux, que d’un poème bien prononcé._ -----