_enjambement_ and hiatus, use plentiful comparisons and terms of art, do things handsomely in general, boil his very kettles with a Homeric afflatus,[180] be thoroughly careful about study, but, above all, attend to diction, as to which the cautions and licences of the _Abrégé_ are repeated in fuller form, with a special injunction not to Ciceronianise idly, but to _faire un lexicon des vieils mots d’Artus, de Lancelot, et de Gauvain_. ----- Footnote 179: _Principalement des boucliers._ Footnote 180: Odd as these things may seem, they are not fool-born jests of an idle historian. Ronsard actually says them, though at greater length. See p. 28, _“Su tu veux faire mourir sur-le-champ quelque capitaine, il le faut navrer au plus mortel lieu du corps, comme le cerveau, le cœur, la gorge_,” &c., &c.; and, p. 29, “_Car s’il fait bouillir de l’eau en un chaudron_,” &c., &c. ----- Ronsard will necessarily give us text for remark on the criticism of the Pléiade in the Interchapter following this Book. [Sidenote: _His critical gospel._] But we must say a little of his critical attitude here. That it is of more interest than positive importance cannot easily be denied. Not only for our purpose, but for its own, it is injured by the very sincerity, practicalness, and common-sense of the writer’s purpose and view. He clearly does not regard the past of French literature with quite such a petulant contempt as that of Pelletier and Du Bellay. But he is even more steadily and thoroughly convinced that something better can, should, and shall be done: and it is on the doing of this, by himself and others, that all his thoughts are fixed. He does not give himself the time—he does not, it is evident, think it in the least worth while—to take a critical survey of the past in any detail, or with any general grouping. It is enough for him that Homer and Virgil are of the greatest, and that their work is also of the greatest; and he wishes Frenchmen to go and do likewise. He almost, if not altogether, accepts the end as a datum; and is only troubled about the means. In regard to some of these means his doctrine, though somewhat _ondoyant_ and even inconsistent, is surprisingly sound and original. If part of it was accepted with advantage by his countrymen in the centuries which followed, other parts were discarded and neglected, with an almost incalculably disastrous result. That “lexicon of the old words of _Lancelot_ and _Artus_” would have saved French from the drab smug insignificance of its eighteenth-century garb; those cautions about _enjambement_ and the like might almost have done for France what Spenser and Shakespeare did for England.