It was to Du Bellay (1549) that France owes the introduction of classical ideas into French literature. He was the first to regard the imitation of the classics as a literary principle, and to advise the poet, after the manner of Vida, to purloin all the treasures of Greek and Latin literature for the benefit of French poetry. Moreover, he first formulated the aristocratic conception of the poet held by the Pleiade. The poet was advised to flee from the ignorant people, to bury himself in the solitude of his own chamber, to dream and to ponder, and to content himself with few readers. "Beyond everything," says Du Bellay, "the poet should have one or more learned friends to whom he can show all his verses; he should converse not only with learned men, but with all sorts of workmen, mechanics, artists, and others, in order to learn the technical terms of their arts, for use in beautiful descriptions."[382] This was a favorite theory of the Pleiade, which like some of our own contemporary writers regarded the technical arts as important subjects of inspiration. But the essential point at the bottom of all these discussions is a high contempt for the opinion of the vulgar in matters of art. The _Quintil Horatian_ (1550) represents, as has already been seen, a natural reaction against the foreign and classical innovations of the Pleiade. Du Bellay's advice, "Prens garde que ce poeme soit eslogne du vulgaire,"--advice insisted upon by many of the rhetoricians of the Italian Renaissance,--receives considerable censure; on the contrary, says the author of the _Quintil_, the poet must be understood and appreciated by all, unlearned as well as learned, just as Marot was. The _Quintil_ was, in fact, the first work to insist on definiteness and clearness in poetry, as these were afterward insisted on by Malherbe and Boileau. Like Malherbe, and his disciple Deimier, the author of the _Academie de l'Art Poetique_ (1610), in which the influence of the _Quintil_ is fully acknowledged, the author of the _Quintil_ objects to all forms of poetic license, to all useless metaphors that obscure the sense, to all Latinisms and foreign terms and locutions.[383] Du Bellay had dwelt on the importance of a knowledge of the classical and Italian tongues, and had strongly advised the French poet to naturalize as many Latin, Greek, and even Spanish and Italian terms as he could. The _Quintil_ is particularly bitter against all such foreign innovations. The poet need not know foreign tongues at all; without this knowledge he can be as good a poet as any of the _graecaniseurs, latiniseurs, et italianiseurs en francoys_. This protest availed little, and Du Bellay's advice in regard to the use of Italian terms was so well followed that several years later, in 1578, Henri Estienne vigorously protested against the practice in his _Dialogues du Nouveau Langage francois italianise_. As Ronsard and Du Bellay represent the foreign