The _gentil_ Belleau was a less strong man than Du Bellay, and it is to the honour of his critical faculty that he recognised the truth. He left the ode, Pindaric or Horatian, alone, and devoted himself either to translation (he translated Anacreon) or to poetry of the style of the _Jeux Rustiques_. His _Bergerie_, 1565, and his _Deuxième Journée de la Bergerie_, 1572, are of this order, while his _Amours et Nouveau Eschanges des pierres précieuses vertus et propriétés d’icelles_ is an imitation, or adaptation, of Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_ and the poets of the Greek decadence, based on a book about the properties of precious stones, written by a Bishop of Rennes in the eleventh century. Our own Euphuists must have gone to the same source. The first _Bergerie_ contains the really delightful “Avril l’honneur et des Bois Et des Mois,” which ranks with Du Bellay’s _Vanneur_ as the masterpiece of the style. It is a curious comment on the theory which accounts for literature by the “circumstances” that all this light verse about graceful things belongs to the years of the conspiracy of Amboise, when the streets of that town were, in the vehement words of Regnier de la Planche, tapestried with the corpses of executed Huguenots, and while the wars of Religion, the Saint Bartholomew, and the League were deluging France in blood. [SN: _Baïf._] Like Belleau, J. B. de Baïf was a translator. His versions of the _Antigone_, and of the _Eunuchus_ of Terence, were published in 1565, and other translations of Greek and Latin drama were left unpublished by him at his death, and have been lost. Baïf was also the author of a comedy imitated from Plautus, _Le Brave_, acted in 1567. His poetry includes the _Ravissement d’Europe_ and _Les Amours de Méline_, 1552, _Les Amours de Francine_, 1555--these are sonnet cycles--the _Météores_ of 1567, his _Étrennes de Poesie Française_, 1574, and the _Mimes_, 1576. Baïf, who was more scholar than poet, took the lead in an attempt to reform French spelling, which indeed at that time stood in no small need of being reduced to order, and he also was one of a small body of writers who repeated in France the hopeless attempt to force the poetry of modern languages to conform to classic metres. His Academy has already been mentioned. Jean Daurat and Pontus de Thyard are chiefly worth mention because their names are associated with those of more original men. Daurat was a humanist, whose share in producing the poetry of the Pléiade was to direct the reading of his pupils at the college of Coqueret, and to write Greek and Latin verse in praise of them. His French verse is insignificant. Pontus de Thyard could claim to be a forerunner of the Pléiade, for his _Erreurs Amoureuses_ appeared shortly before the first published verse of Ronsard and Du Bellay. But he soon renounced verse for theology and mathematics.[92]