Still younger and probably still more short-lived, but superior as a poet, was Jacques Tahureau[199]. He was born at Le Mans of a noble family, and died at the age of twenty-eight. But his life, if short, was a happy one, and, like most of his contemporaries, he published a volume of amatory sonnets under the title, gracefully affected even for that age of graceful affectation, of _Mignardises Amoureuses de l'Admiree_. Unlike many of the heroines of the Pleiade and their satellites, who are either known or shrewdly suspected to have been imaginary, the _Admiree_ of Tahureau was a real person. What is more, he married her, and they lived together for three years before his early death. Before the _Mignardises_, he had published a _Premier Recueil_, and after them he produced a third volume of odes, sonnets, etc. All three display the same peculiarities, and these peculiarities are sufficiently remarkable. Tahureau was named by the flattery and the classical fancies of his contemporaries the French Catullus, and the parallel is not so rash as might be thought. It is true that it came originally from Du Bellay in one of his satirical veins. But a later poetical critic, Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, is more precise in his description, and oddly enough uses the very term which was afterwards applied in England to Shakespeare's youthful sonnets. Tahureau, he says:-- Nous affrianda tous au sucre de cet art. The author of the _Mignardises_ is indeed somewhat 'sugared' in his style of writing; but there are genuine passion and genuine poetical feeling as well in his verse. Of the minor poets of the time he is probably the best. [Sidenote: Minor Ronsardists.]