We need not agree with all this breezy advice. It is impossible to re-create a language all at once. If there is not inspiration, there cannot be good poetry, though one may have infinite good models to follow. Nevertheless the new school was a success for half a century, and both Ronsard and Du Bellay, though often mechanical and often flat, have left a few imperishable sonnets and other pieces. Our own Elizabethans not only read Marot and his contemporary Saint-Gelais (who introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into France), they also read Du Bellay, who finally established the sonnet and at the same time served as a pattern for English writers. One writer of the Ronsardist school, Du Bartas, was a writer of real religious conviction, and his _Semaine_ or _Week of Creation_, translated by Sylvester, gained no small currency in England. What calls for particular notice in this connection is the deliberate way in which French writers and critics can contemplate and formulate the principles and methods of good literature. The English, to whom so much of French verse is cold and mechanical, may perhaps think that it is this same formulating which has done incalculable harm to poetry, a thing in its nature as incapable of regulation as are our emotions and our thoughts. But the French are of another opinion, and it is at least fair to say that, if writing by rules hampers the flight of genius and prevents creations of the sublime, it on the other hand checks the production of that utter doggerel which has been so often inflicted on readers of English literature. We shall do best to complete at once the history of this formulation, and then retrace our steps.