We feel a pensive
pleasure in seeing these faded decorations, and observing how a group of
actual men and women pleased themselves long ago. Ronsard's poems are a
kind of epitome of his age. Of one side of that age, it is true, of the
strenuous, the progressive, the serious movement, which was then going
on, there is little; but of the catholic side, the losing side, the
forlorn hope, hardly a figure is absent. The Queen of Scots, at whose
desire Ronsard published his odes, reading him in her northern prison,
felt that he was bringing back to her the true flavour of her early days
in the court of Catherine at the Louvre, with its exotic Italian
gaieties. Those who disliked that poetry, disliked it because they found
that age itself distasteful. The poetry of Malherbe came, with its
sustained style and weighty sentiment, but with nothing that set people
singing; and the lovers of such poetry saw in the poetry of the Pleiad
only the latest trumpery of the middle age. But the time came also when
the school of Malherbe had had its day; and the Romanticists, who in
their eagerness for excitement, for strange music and imagery, went back
to the works of the middle age, accepted the Pleiad too with the rest;
and in that new middle age which their genius has evoked, the poetry of
the Pleiad has found its place.
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