The natural aptitude of the French for discipline in literature, and their tendency to form schools, to set up a doctrine, and to reject all that is not compatible with it, have never been more strongly shown than during the Later Renaissance. Other influences were at work. It would be very rash to say that classic or Italian models had a visible influence on Carloix’s memoirs of Vielleville, or the commentaries of Monluc, or even the vast unnamed, or misnamed, compilation of Brantôme. Yet the Renaissance did, on the whole, dominate France, though it could not eliminate, or suppress, what was essentially French. Its intense interest in the life and the character of man was never better shown than by Montaigne. In poetry the attempt to adapt the classic and Italian models to French use swept all before it. Nowhere was the French disposition to find its freedom in the service of a classic model more clearly seen than in the drama of the Pléiade. It is true that Jodelle, Garnier, Belleau, Grévin, and the others may be said to have failed. They did not produce any dramatic literature which has much more than an interest of curiosity. Yet the later history of the French stage proves that they were making their efforts on lines congenial to their nation. The dramatists of the Augustan age did no more than work in the same spirit, and to the same ends as their forgotten predecessors, with altered--and but slightly altered--means. A comparison between the three literatures will go far to explain their respective fates. For the Spanish there could not well be any future. A strong national character, unchanging, and so close in the fibre that it never really admits a foreign influence, could not well do more than express itself once. The time came when it had said its say--and nothing then remained except, first mere juggling with words, and then silence--Góngorism and Decadence. In England and in France there was the hope, and even the assurance, of far more to come. Though the Spanish story has been carried beyond the dates allowed for France and England, there is no unfairness in this sentence. In 1616 Lope had still much of his best work to do. Quevedo, Calderon, and Góngora were to come; but the first and second brought nothing, or at least very little, absolutely new, and the third brought destruction. Lope was only to do what he had done already. When Shakespeare died in England and Mathurin Regnier in France, a long succession was to follow them. Englishmen and Frenchmen had learnt their lesson from the Renaissance, and were to use their knowledge. FOOTNOTE: [122] The names of Corte-Real (1540-1593), P. de Andrade (1576-1660), Sá de Menezes (----?-1664), may represent this class. Others, with the classical prose of Vieira and G. de Andrade, which continued the work of Barros (1496-1570), may be referred to in the next volume. INDEX. Acuña, Ferdinand de, 43. Alarcon, Juan Ruiz de, 83, 93, 102-105. Aleman, Mateo, 7, 137, 141.