He buys two bits of land, he talks of them continually, sees to them, visits them. They are quite little bits of land. He calls one Clement, and the other Marot! Here is a whimsicality you would not find, I think, among another people. He has the hatred of "sprawling" in his particular art which is the chief aesthetic character of the French; but he has the tendency to excess in opinion or in general expression which is their chief political fault. It is thus, then, that I think he should be regarded and that I would desire to present him. It is thus, I am sure, that he should be read if one is to know why he has taken so great a place in the reverence and the history of the French people. And it is in this aspect that he may worthily introduce much greater things, the Pleiade and Ronsard. OF COURTING LONG AGO. (_The Eighth of the Roundels._) This is a fair enough specimen of Marot at his daily gait: an easy versifier "on a theme" and no more. I have said that it is unjust to judge him on that level, and I have said why; but I give this to give the man as he moved domestically to the admiration of the court and of his friends in a time which missed, for example, the epic character of the last six lines of "Le Beau Tettin," and which hardly comprehended of what value his pure lyric enthusiasms would be to a sadder and drier posterity. _OF COURTING LONG AGO._ _Au bon vieulx temps un train d'amour regnoit, Qui sans grand art et dons se demenoit, Si qu'un boucquet donne d'amour profonde S'estoit donne toute la terre ronde: Car seulement au cueur on se prenoit._ _Et si, par cas, a jouyr on venoit, Scavez-vous bien comme on s'entretenoit? Vingt ans, trente ans; cela duroit ung monde Au bon vieulx temps._ _Or est perdu ce qu'amour ordonnoit, Rien que pleurs fainctz, rien que changes on n'oyt. Qui vouldra donc qu'a aymer je me fonde, Il fault, premier, que l'amour on refonde Et qu'on la meine ainsi qu'on la menoit Au bon vieulx temps._ NOEL. (_The Second of the Chansons._) But here, upon the contrary, is the spontaneity of his happy mind; it suggests a song; one can hardly read it without a tune in one's head, so simple is it and so purely lyrical: there is a touch of the dance in it, too. In these little things of Marot, which are neither learned (and he boasted of learning) nor set and dry (and his friends especially praised his precision), a great poet certainly appears--in short revelations, but still appears. Unfortunately there are not enough of them. That he thought "like a Southerner," as I have maintained and as I shall show by a further example, is made the more probable from the value he lends to the feminine e. The excellent rhythm of this poem you will only get by giving the feminine e the value of a drawn out syllable: