so completely from the mediæval tradition; and there is unanswerable force in Sainte-Beuve’s criticism that if Ronsard and his school were looking for _épiceries_, they had as good cause to condemn the sonnet as the “rondeau” or the “ballade.” Yet it was not the great mediæval literature which they had before them. That was already forgotten. They did a work by which the seventeenth century, while treating them with contempt, profited. If they did not achieve all they aimed at, it was because no one among them--not even Ronsard--was a man of the first rank of poetic genius, not because their principles and method were at fault. And there is this to be said--that if some of their followers fell into extravagances of language (the poets of the Pléiade proper and their contemporaries were not, at least in their earlier years, open to the reproach), they did not impoverish the French tongue. They did not reduce it, when used for literary purposes, to colourless general terms; nor did they tie the Alexandrine into sets of two lines by making a meaningless rule that the sense was never to be carried over into a third. Their revolution was more fruitful, and less merely destructive, than Malherbe’s. [SN: _The work of Ronsard._] Although Du Bellay appeared as the spokesman of the school, he was instantly eclipsed by Ronsard. The Odes of the “Prince of Poets” were published in 1550, at about the same time as the Sonnets to Olive (an anagram of Mlle. de Viole) of Du Bellay. He was at once accepted as _the_ poet of his time, and his supremacy endured till his death without question, except for one moment in his later years when it appeared to be shaken by the popularity of Du Bartas. The _Amours de Cassandre_[90] followed in 1552, with a second edition in the following years, which contains the famous “Mignonne allons voir si la rose.” In 1555 appeared the Hymns, and in 1560 he collected all he had as yet written in a complete edition at the request of Queen Mary, who was his ardent admirer, as was also Queen Elizabeth. Between 1561 and 1574 he was attached to the service of Charles IX., who treated him with kindness, and whose “virtues” he celebrated, even after his death, in terms which sound strange to us. As Court poet he wrote “by command,” which is not a favourable source of inspiration. It was to please the king that he wrote his fragmentary epic, _Franciade_, which his most sincere admirers have to confess is “dull.” It had the misfortune to be published on the eve of the Saint Bartholomew. Yet his _Discours des Misères du Temps_ (1562) and his _Remonstrance au Peuple de France_ (1563) belong to these years, and they were drawn from him by the shocking miseries of the time. Henri III., though generous to some, was less a favourer of poets than his brother, and Ronsard was free to express himself in the lyrics and melancholy sonnets of his last years. At the very end, when his health was broken down and his mind