It has been already said that this provisional, tentative, and somewhat ineffectual character is characteristic, and prophetically characteristic, of the school. The Pléiade did not, like Ronsard’s slightly younger contemporary Spenser and his followers in England, set French poetry once for all on the path on which, with whatever minor changes, it was henceforth to go. Some thirty or forty years of never wholly successful experiment were succeeded by an unjust supplanting, and by another thirty or forty of random tentatives, corresponding in some ways to those of England nearly a century earlier. Only then did France fall into a way, not by any means of perfection, but sufficiently suited to her genius to enable her to travel fast and far in it. It is a serious thing for Pléiade criticism that we have from it no thorough examination of any part of French literature. No doubt such examinations are not the strong point of Renaissance Criticism. But generally there is more approach to them in Italian, with the scattered remarks of the critics on Dante and Petrarch, with the controversies about the _romanzi_ in general and the _Orlando_ and _Gerusalemme_ in particular; there is more even in English, with the surveys, imperfect as they are, of the earlier Elizabethans over the past of poetry, with the literature of the “classical metres” quarrel, with the (no doubt later) remarks of Ben on Shakespeare and others. The fault of Pléiade Criticism, in short, is that it is at once too particularist and too little particular.[288] ----- Footnote 288: Some exception ought, perhaps, to be made for Pasquier: but not much. ----- Crossing the Channel, as we lately crossed the Alps, we do not find a simple transmission of indebtedness. It would have been surprising, considering the strong intellectual interests of the Colet group, and the early presence in England of such a critical force as Erasmus, if this country had waited to receive a current merely transmitted through France from Italy. It is possible that, later, Gascoigne may have derived something from Ronsard, and it is quite certain that “E. K.'s” notes on the _Calendar_ show symptoms of Pléiade influence, even in the bad point of contempt, or at least want of respect, for Marot. But it is exceedingly improbable that Ascham derived any impulsion from Du Bellay: it is certain, as we have seen, that he knew Italian critics like Pigna directly; and it is equally certain that, either by his own studies or through Cheke, his critical impulses must have been excited humanistically long before the French had got beyond the merely _rhétoriqueur_ standard of Sibilet.