The second treats in vivid satire the eternal question of the honor due the scholar:
"Friend! tell of these two things the just degree,
Great learning or great wealth; the better which?
I know not. But the learned still I see
Paying great court and homage to the rich."
The "Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française," which is the manifesto of the Pleiades, was written by Joachim du Bellay just at the end of Columbus' Century and published in February, 1550, according to the modern calendar, but 1549 in the old, which made the year begin on Lady Day (March 25). With that a group of men, most of them about twenty-five years of age, entered upon a new period of French literature. A sham middle age had been lingering on,--the mere remnants and echo of the Romance of the Rose, and now a new spirit was to enter into French literature. The genius of it had all been cradled in Columbus' Century. The poets of the Pleiades came to teach the modern note. Pierre Ronsard was the greatest of them, and in five years all Europe knew something of the new birth in French poetry. Two such very different minds as those of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth of England became ardent admirers and indeed almost patrons of the new poets, and particularly of Ronsard. Many of the poems had been conceived, and some of the best were issued within a year or two after the close of what we have called Columbus' Century. The little lyric Mignonne! Allons voir si la Rose," which has always been a favorite in every generation with any poetry in its soul, was known throughout Europe within a year of its publication in 1552.
There is another ode of Ronsard's of much more serious vein which serves to show that the poets of the older time could think of other things besides love and beauty and the rose, and face the sterner problems of their time and sing the [{469}] meaning of them with poetic depth. Because its subject is quite as eternal in its interest as that of the love poems and has perhaps more significance for our time, I prefer to quote it:
"Why, poor peasant, should you dread
Sceptered hand or crowned head?
They shall soon--slight shades--be sent
The number of the dead t' augment.
To all mortals--dost not wis?--
Death's wide gate e'er open is.
There th' imperial soul must wend,
There as speedily descend,
Charon's fatal boat to find,
As the soul of serf or hind.
Courage you who delvers are;
These great thunderbolts of war
No more than yourselves shall go
Armed with breastplate there below,
As though battling as of yore.
Mail shall profit them no more--
Lance and shield and battle blade--
Than shall you your scythe and spade.
Rhadamanthus, judge severe,
Be you sure no more will fear
Armor in his dread abode
Than the peasant's wooden goad;
Nor does more or less admire
Richest robe or mean attire,
Or the gorgeous pageantry
Where the king in state doth lie."
Joachim du Bellay, snatched away at the early age of thirty-five after having passed many years in illness, owed his inspiration to write poetry to his reading of the classics. It was he who wrote the proclamation of the Pleiades which I have already mentioned. Had his fate been happier, doubtless there [{470}] would have been many great poems from him and he would have been a serious rival of his friend Ronsard. As it is, there are from his pen some poems that will always have an interest for the French and for the educated in every country. One of the more serious deserves to be quoted.
"If, then, our life is shorter than a day
Lost in all time; if the revolving year
Hurries our days past hope to reappear;
If all things born must fail and pass away--
What, O my prisoned soul, dost dream of? say!
Why so much love our days of darkness here.
If to take flight to an abode more dear,
Well-feathered wings you on your shoulders sway?
There is the good which ever soul desires.
There the repose to which the world aspires,
And there is love and pleasure evermore.
There, O my soul, rapt to the highest skies,
You will in actual substance recognize
Th' ideal beauty which I now adore."
In the French prose of our century there is Comines at the beginning, a not unworthy fourth in that wonderful quartette of French historical writers which began with Villehardouin at the end of the twelfth century, gave us Joinville in the thirteenth, Froissart in the fourteenth and Comines in the latter half of the fifteenth. He is one of the historians who will ever be read; with a political sagacity and philosophic outlook on history that give him a place of his own. He was no mere chronicler, and the individuality of his work, that quality by which history is raised into literature, sets him far above many a modern writer of what is called history, though it is merely a collection of materials for some historian who will inform them with a soul. At the end of the century there was Michel de L'Hôpital, whose orations, numerous memoirs and special treatises mainly connected with explanations of [{471}] law have the defects of legal writing at all times, and yet exhibit a power of expression that has seldom been equalled at any time.
After Rabelais, undoubtedly the greatest of the prose writers of the time was Amyot, whose first work, a translation of a Greek romance, "Théagène et Chariclé," was published in 1546, and who, in the subsequent years of a life that reached almost to ninety, published his translations of Plutarch, a work for which he received the designation of preceptor of the royal children and the Bishopric of Auxerre. He was the grand almoner.
Amyot's translation of Plutarch has been declared practically a new and original work. Montaigne said of it: