forgotten that they had a solid basis of philological truth to go upon. French, after all, despite a strong Teutonic admixture, was a Latin tongue, and recurrence to Latin, and to the still more majestic and fertile language which had had so much to do in shaping the literary Latin dialect, was natural and germane to its character. In point of fact, the Pleiade made modern French--made it, we may say, twice over; for not only did its original work revolutionise the language in a manner so durable that the reaction of the next century could not wholly undo it, but it was mainly study of the Pleiade that armed the great masters of the Romantic movement, the men of 1830, in their revolt against the cramping rules and impoverished vocabulary of the eighteenth century. The effect of the change indeed was far too universal for it to be possible for any Malherbe or any Boileau to overthrow it. The whole literature of the nation, at a time when it was wonderfully abundant and vigorous, 'Ronsardised' for nearly fifty years, and such practice at such a time never fails to leave its mark. The actual details of the movement cannot better be given than by going through the list of its chief participators. [Sidenote: Ronsard.] [Sidenote: The Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise.] Pierre de Ronsard[193], Prince of Poets[194], was born at La Poissonniere, in the Vendomois, or, as it was then more often called, the Gatinais, on the banks of the river Loir, in 1524. He died in his own country in the year 1585, acknowledged, not merely in France but out of it, as the leader of living poets. His early life, however, was rather that of a man of action than of a poet, and one of the most studious of poets. His father was an old courtier and servant of Francis I., whose companion in captivity he had been, and Ronsard entered upon court life when he was a boy of ten years old. He visited Scotland and England in the suite of French ambassadors, and remained for some considerable time in Great Britain. He was also attached to embassies in Flanders, Holland, and Germany. But before he was of age he fell ill, and though he recovered, it was at the cost of permanent deafness, which incapacitated him for the public service. He threw himself on literature for a consolation, and under the direction of Daurat, a scholar of renown, studied for years at the College Coqueret. Here Du Bellay, Belleau, Baif, were his fellow-students, and the four with their master, with Etienne Jodelle, and with Pontus de Tyard, afterwards bishop of Chalon, formed, as has been said, the Pleiade according to the most orthodox computation. The idea conceived and carried out in these studious years (by Ronsard himself and Du Bellay beyond all doubt in the first place) was the reformation of French language and French literature by study and imitation of the ancients. In 1549 the manifesto of the society issued, in the shape of Du Bellay's