of science opened out vast fresh regions of speculation and adventure.  Men saw with astonishment the old world of their fathers vanishing away, and, within them and without them, the dawning of a new heaven and a new earth.  The effect on literature of these combined forces was enormous.  In France particularly, under the strong and brilliant government of Francis I, there was an outburst of original and vital writing.  This literature, which begins, in effect, what may be called the distinctively modern literature of France, differs in two striking respects from that of the Middle Ages.  Both in their attitude towards art and in their attitude towards thought, the great writers of the Renaissance inaugurated a new era in French literature.

The new artistic views of the age first appeared, as was natural, in the domain of poetry.  The change was one towards consciousness and deliberate, self-critical effort.  The medieval poets had sung with beauty; but that was not enough for the poets of the Renaissance:  they determined to sing not only with beauty, but with care.  The movement began in the verse of MAROT, whose clear, civilized, worldly poetry shows for the first time that tendency to select and to refine, that love of ease and sincerity, and that endeavour to say nothing that is not said well, which were to become the fundamental characteristics of all that was best in French poetry for the next three hundred years.  In such an exquisite little work of art as his epistle in three-syllabled verse—­’A une Damoyselle Malade’, beginning—­

    Ma mignonne,
    Je vous donne
    Le bonjour,

we already have, in all its completeness, that tone of mingled distinction, gaiety and grace which is one of the unique products of the mature poetical genius of France.  But Marot’s gift was not wide enough for the voluminous energies of the age; and it was not until a generation later, in the work of the Pleiade—­a group of writers of whom RONSARD was the chief, and who flourished about the middle of the sixteenth century—­that the poetical spirit of the French Renaissance found its full expression.

The mere fact that the Pleiade formed a definite school, with common principles and a fixed poetical creed, differentiates them in a striking way from the poets who had preceded them.  They worked with no casual purpose, no merely professional art, but with a high sense of the glory of their calling and a noble determination to give to the Muses whom they worshipped only of their best.  They boldly asserted—­in Du Bellay’s admirable essay, La Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise—­the right of the French language to stand beside those of the ancients, as a means of poetical expression; and they devoted their lives to the proof of their doctrine.  But their respect for their own tongue by no means implied a neglect of the Classics.  On the contrary, they shared to the full the adoration