Although the linguistic and prosodic theories of the Pleiade partly anticipate both the theory and the practice of later classicism, the members of the school exhibit numerous deviations from what was afterward accepted as inviolable law in French poetry. The most important of these deviations concerns the use of words from the various French dialects, from foreign tongues, and from the technical and mechanical arts. A partial expression of this theory of poetic language has already been seen in Du Bellay's _Defense et Illustration_, in which the poet is urged to use the more elegant technical dialectic terms. Ronsard gives very much the same advice. The best words in all the French dialects are to be employed by the poet; for it is doubtless to the number of the dialects of Greece that we may ascribe the supreme beauty of its language and literature. The poet is not to affect too much the language of the court, since it is often very bad, being the language of ladies and of young gentlemen who make a profession of fighting well rather than of speaking well.[416] Unlike Malherbe and his school, Ronsard allows a certain amount of poetic license, but only rarely and judiciously. It is to poetic license, he says, that we owe nearly all the beautiful figures with which poets, in their divine rapture, enfranchising the laws of grammar, have enriched their works. "This is that birthright," said Dryden, a century later, in the preface of his _State of Innocence and the Fall of Man_, "which is derived to us from our great forefathers, even from Homer down to Ben; and they who would deny it to us have, in plain terms, the fox's quarrel to the grapes--they cannot reach it." Vauquelin de la Fresnaye follows Ronsard and Du Bellay in urging the use of new and dialect words, the employment of terms and comparisons from the mechanic arts, and the various other doctrines by which the Pleiade is distinguished from the school of Malherbe. How these useless linguistic innovations were checked and banished from the French language forever will be briefly alluded to in the next chapter. FOOT-NOTES: [381] Brunetiere, i. 45. [382] _Defense_, ii. 11. [383] _Cf._ Rucktaeschel, p. 10 _sq._ [384] _Art Poet._ i. 3. [385] _Ibid._ i. 9. [386] _Ibid._ i. 10. [387] Ronsard, iii. 26 _sq._ [388] _Ibid._ vii. 323. [389] Ronsard, iii. 9 _sq._ [390] _Ibid._ iii. 23, 26. [391] _Art Poet._ iii. 1151. [392] _Ibid._ i. 61. [393] _Art Poet._ i. 22 _sq._ [394] _Ibid._ i. 813. _Cf._ Ronsard, ii. 12. [395] Ronsard, vii. 320, 332. [396] The early Italian poetry written in classical metres has been collected by Carducci, _La Poesia Barbara nei Secoli XV e XVI_, Bologna, 1881. [397] Carducci, p. 2. [398] _Ibid._ p. 6 _sq._ [399] Carducci, pp. 55, 87, etc. [400] _Ibid._ pp. 327, 443. _Cf._ Du Bellay, _Defense_, ii. 7.