[87] The titles of these pamphlets were very important parts of them, and this may be quoted as an example: “Hay any Work for Cooper, or a briefe Pistle directed by way of hublication to the reverend Byshopps, counselling them if they will needs be barrelled up, for fear of smelling in the nostrels of her Magestie and the State, that they would use the advice of reverend Martin, for the providing of their Cooper. Because the reverend T. C. (by which mystical letters is meant either the bouncing Parson of _Eastmeane_, or Tom Coakes his Chaplaine) hath showne himself in his late Admonition to the people of England to bee an unskilfull and deceytfull tub-trimmer. Wherein worthy Martin quits himselfe like a man, I warrant you, in the modest defences of his self and his learned Pistles, and makes the Cooper’s hoops to fly off, and the Bishops’ tubs to leake out of all crye. Penned and compiled by _Martin_ the Metropolitane. Printed in Europe, not farre from some of the Bounsing Priests.” [88] Works of Richard Hooker. Oxford, 1841. CHAPTER X. FRANCE. POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. THE PLÉIADE--RONSARD--THE LESSER STARS--‘THE DÉFENSE ET ILLUSTRATION DE LA LANGUE FRANÇAISE’--THE WORK OF RONSARD--HIS PLACE IN POETRY--JOACHIM DU BELLAY--REMI BELLEAU--BAÏF--DU BARTAS--D’AUBIGNÉ--THE DRAMATIC WORK OF THE PLÉIADE--JODELLE--GREVIN AND LA TAILLE--MONTCHRESTIEN--THE COMEDY--‘LA RECONNUE’--CAUSES OF FAILURE OF EARLY DRAMATIC LITERATURE. The French literature of the later Renaissance is divided, almost as it were by visible mechanical barriers, from what had gone before, and from what was to come after. The distinction is less marked in prose, but even here it is real, while the poetry of the time is the work of a school, with a creed and a set of formulas all its own. It has ever been much the custom of the French, whether in politics, in art, or in literature, to move altogether, and to make a clean sweep. Every new school rejects its predecessor with more or less indiscriminate contempt, becomes a tyranny in its turn, and is, in the fulness of time, rebelled against, and destroyed. The process has never been shown more fully and with fewer disturbing elements than in the history of the Pléiade. Exactly in the middle of the century a small body of young writers took possession of French poetry, dismissed the forms of their elders as “grocery” (_épiceries_), just as the romantic writers of this century labelled the classic style as “wig” (_perruque_), and ruled without opposition, till one fine day they were scored out by the equally irreverent, though more pedantic, and less generous pen of Malherbe. [SN: _The Pléiade._]