of the Medici is staking masterpieces against that of Leo X and
Julius II, Titian and Paul Veronese are rendering the home of Doges
illustrious. Saint Mark's competes with Saint Peter's.

This fever of genius that had broken out suddenly in the Italian
peninsula with epidemic violence spreads its glorious contagion
throughout Europe. Art, the rival of God, strides on, the equal of
kings. Charles V stoops to pick up Titian's brush, and Francis I dances
attendance at the printing office where Etienne Dolet is perhaps
correcting the proofs of "Pantagruel."

Amidst this resurrection of intelligence, Bohemia continued as in the
past to seek, according to Balzac's expression, a bone and a kennel.
Clement Marot, the familiar of the ante-chamber of the Louvre, became,
even before she was a monarch's mistress, the favorite of that fair
Diana, whose smile lit up three reigns. From the boudoir of Diane de
Poitiers, the faithless muse of the poet passed to that of Marguerite de
Valois, a dangerous favor that Marot paid for by imprisonment. Almost
at the same epoch another Bohemian, whose childhood on the shores of
Sorrento had been caressed by the kisses of an epic muse, Tasso, entered
the court of the Duke of Ferrara as Marot had that of Francis I. But
less fortunate than the lover of Diane and Marguerite, the author of
"Jerusalem Delivered" paid with his reason and the loss of his genius
the audacity of his love for a daughter of the house of Este.

The religious contests and political storms that marked the arrival of
Medicis in France did not check the soaring flight of art. At the moment
when a ball struck on the scaffold of the Fontaine des Innocents Jean
Goujon who had found the Pagan chisel of Phidias, Ronsard discovered the
lyre of Pindar and founded, aided by his pleiad, the great French lyric