The unfortunate results of the excessive use of such circumlocutions are well exemplified in the later classicists of France. Ronsard perhaps foresaw this danger, and wisely says that circumlocution, if not used judiciously, makes the style inflated and bombastic. In the first preface to the _Franciade_, he expresses a decided preference for the naive facility of Homer over the artful diligence of Virgil.[389] In the second preface, however, written a dozen years later, and published posthumously as revised by his disciple Binet, there is interesting evidence, in the preeminence given to Virgil, of the rapidity with which the Latinization of culture was being effected at this period. "Our French authors," says Ronsard, "know Virgil far better than they know Homer or any other Greek writer." And again, "Virgil is the most excellent and the most rounded, the most compact and the most perfect of all poets."[390] Of the naive facility of Homer we hear absolutely nothing. We are now beginning to enter the era of rules. Ronsard did not undervalue the "rules and secrets" of poetry; and Vauquelin de la Fresnaye calls his own critical poem _cet Art de Regles recherchees_.[391] In regard to the imitation of the classics, Vauquelin agrees heart and soul with the Pleiade that the ancients "nous ont desja trace Un sentier qui de nous ne doit estre laisse."[392] Nothing, indeed, could be more classical than his comparison of poetry to a garden symmetrically laid out and trimmed.[393] Moreover, like the classicists of the next century, he affirms, as does Ronsard also, that art must fundamentally imitate and resemble nature.[394]