was ever put forth as a poem. He had a very heavy hand, and he sowed with the whole sack. Our own Bishop Joseph Hall of Norwich, who called him "some French angel, girt with bays," described Du Bartas as-- The glorious Sallust, moral, true, divine, Who, all inspired with a holy rage, Makes Heaven his subject, and the earth his stage. In his own time his myriad admirers preferred him above "golden Homer and great Maro." His earnestness and his cleverness--among other things he was the first man after the Renaissance to see that the obsession of the heathen gods was ridiculous in a Christian literature--his abundance and his vehemence, made Du Bartas a very formidable figure in the path of any possible reform. As an instance of the violence of fancy and gaudy extravagance of language which had become prevalent with the decline of the Pléiade, I will now present to you what I select as a favourable, not a ridiculous, example of the art of Du Bartas. He wishes to paraphrase the simple statement in Genesis that, on the fourth day, God set the stars in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth. This is how he does it, as translated by Joshua Sylvester: Even as a peacock, prickt with love's desire, To woo his mistress, strutting stately by her, Spreads round the rich pride of his pompous vail, His azure wings and starry-golden tail, With rattling pinions wheeling still about, The more to set his beauteous beauty out,-- The Firmament, as feeling like above, Displays his pomp, pranceth about his love, Spreads his blue curtain, mixt with golden marks, Set with gilt spangles, sown with glistening sparks, Sprinkled with eyes, speckled with tapers bright, Powdered with stars streaming with glorious light, To inflame the Earth the more, with lover's grace To take the sweet fruit of his kind embrace. Our first impression of such a passage as this is one of admiration of its colour and of its ingenuity. It is more than rich, it is sumptuous; the picture of the wheeling peacock is original and brilliantly observed. But there commendation must cease. What could be meaner or less appropriate than to compare the revolution of the starry firmament as it proceeded from its Creator's hand with the strut of a conceited bird in a poultry-yard? The works of Du Bartas are stuffed full with these strained and fantastic similes, his surface sparkles with the glitter of tinsel and pinchbeck. At every turn something majestic reminds him of an embroidery, of a false jewel, of something picturesque and mean. The planets, in their unison, are like the nails in a cart-wheel; when darkness comes on, heaven is playing at blind man's buff; the retreat of the armies of the King of Assyria reminds the poet of a gamekeeper drawing his ferret. He desires the snow to fall that it may "perriwig with wool the bald-pate woods." All is extravagant and false, all is offensive to the modesty of nature.