so Ronsard addresses his mistress; and the image is a charming one of
quiet and refined old age, with its half-smiling memories of vanished
loves. What had become, in the hands of Villon, a subject for grim jests
and horrible descriptions, gave to Ronsard simply an opportunity for the
delicate pathos of regret. Then again the note changes, and the pure,
tense passion of Louise Labé--

Oh! si j'étais en ce beau sein ravie
De celui-là pour lequel vais mourant--

falls upon our ears. And then, in the great sonnet sequence of Du
Bellay--_Les Antiquités de Rome_--we hear a splendid sound unknown
before in French poetry--the sonorous boom of proud and pompous verse.


Contemporary with the poetry of the _Pléiade_, the influence of the
Renaissance spirit upon French literature appeared with even more
striking force in the prose of RABELAIS. The great achievement of the
_Pléiade_ had been the establishment, once and for all, of the doctrine
that literature was something essentially artistic; it was Rabelais who
showed that it possessed another quality--that it was a mighty
instrument of thought. The intellectual effort of the Middle Ages had
very rarely clothed itself in an artistic literary form. Men laughed or
wept in the poetry or prose of their own tongue; but they thought in
scholastic Latin. The work of Jean de Meung was an exception; but, even
there, the poetical form was rough and feeble; the artistic and the
intellectual principles had not coalesced. The union was accomplished by
Rabelais. Far outstripping Jean de Meung in the comprehensiveness and
vigour of his thought, he at the same time infinitely surpassed him as