Taking it up where the middle age had left it, they found their whole
work among the last subtleties of colour and line; and keeping within
the true limits of their material, they got quite a new order of effects
from it, and felt their way to refinements on colour never dreamed of by
those older workmen, the glass-painters of Chartres or Le Mans. What is
called the Renaissance in France is thus not so much the introduction of
a wholly new taste ready-made from Italy, but rather the finest and
subtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last fleeting splendour and
temperate Saint Martin's summer. In poetry, the Gothic spirit in France
had produced a thousand songs; and in the Renaissance, French poetry too
did but borrow something to blend with a native growth, and the poems of
Ronsard, with their ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces, their
slightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are but the
correlative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Coeur at Bourges,
or the Maison de Justice at Rouen.
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