poet, Fulvio Testi (1593-1646), imitated the external manner of Horace, and adapted it to the service of the various princes who patronised him. A Court poet is necessarily obliged to produce flattering poetry, and excellent models of well-bred flattery were to be found in Horace; but imitation has its decent limits, and what might be feigned of Augustus, the master of the Roman world, could hardly be repeated with propriety of Philip IV. of Spain. Testi, however, does not hesitate to write of the latter :

O Re di Regi, il cui diffuso impero

A gran pena del Sol l'occhio misura,
Al cui scettro Natura

Partorì fuor del Mondo un Mondo intero,
Non isdegnar d'oscura

E pellegrina cetra il suon, che stride,

Nè ti turbar, s' a te fo pari Alcide.

L' Idra che da più capi orrendi e crudi
Vomitò di velen spume mortali,

E, feconda di mali,

Tutte infettò le Belgiche paludi,

Trionfo è de' tuoi strali;

Ed or dell' empie teste i tronchi scemi

Dan su i liti d' Olanda i guizzi estremi.1

Although the operation of the Classical Renaissance in France was inwardly the same as in Italy, its external effects were different in form and character. The flood of barbaric invasion had equally overspread both countries, but France lacked what Italy possessed, an abundance of cities to form the nucleus of a new civil order. Feudal institutions, therefore, took strong root in the French Kingdom, and the movement of civilisation there resolved itself into a struggle between the King and his Great Vassals. Gradually, though very slowly, the Monarchical power gained the upper hand; but when the refining influence of

1 King of Kings, whose wide Empire the Sun's eye scarcely measures, for whose sceptre Nature brought forth a whole world beyond the world, disdain not the sound that rises from an obscure and foreign lyre, nor be angry if I compare thee with Alcides. The Hydra that from many horrid and cruel heads vomited deadly foam of venom, and, fruitful of evils, infected all the Belgic marshes, is the victim of your arrows; and now the trunks, severed from her impious heads, writhe in dying struggles on the shores of Holland.—— Translated from Opere Scelte del Conte De Fulvio Testi (1817), p. 110.

the new Learning passed northwards from Italy, the contest between the rival forces was far from being decided.

2

The character of this internal struggle is spiritually reflected in the development of the French language and literature. In treating of the early Renaissance in France, I dwelt on the opposition of thought running through the two parts of the Roman de la Rose1; and I afterwards showed how this twofold stream of conflicting principle was carried on with Machault, Eustace Deschamps, and Charles of Orleans, as the representatives of Feudalism, with Coquillart and Villon, as the spokesmen of the bourgeoisie, down to the time when the Court of Francis I. began to form a social centre capable of assimilating and reproducing the refining spirit of the Italian Renaissance. The question then was whether the traditional forms of speech, preserved in old literary monuments, should be polished by the conversation of the Court, or whether, in the spirit of the grammarians, the language should be stereotyped according to literary models, Greek, Latin, and Italian, apart from the vulgar colloquial usage. Francis I. leant, with Marot (1495-1544), to the former alternative; Charles IX. and Henri III. inclined to the side of Ronsard (1 524-1585) and the Pleiad, whose ideas were also favoured by most of the French aristocracy. For a long time the strong sectional currents in society caused the national instinct to waver between the opposite ideals of the Feudal and Bourgeois parties; but after the appearance of Malherbe the movement of things in France turned the taste of the people strongly to the side of the latter; and the Court, instinctively, threw its influence into the same scale. Precisely at the time when the Bourbon dynasty began to bear down the opposition of the Feudal nobility and the political liberties of the Huguenots, the critical and intellectual portion of society began to determine the limits of French taste; and as Henri IV., Richelieu, and Mazarin, successively advanced the power of the Crown, so did Malherbe (1555-1628), Corneille (1606-1664), 2 Vol. ii. pp. 38-42.

1 Vol. i. pp. 176-185.

3 Ibid. pp. 180-181.

and the chiefs of the Academy, prescribe, one after another, the rules for French literary and dramatic composition. The romantic coteries of the Hotel Rambouillet, on the other hand, formed the Fronde both of politics and poetry.

Under Louis XIV. and the literary dictatorship of Boileau (1636-1711), the centralising tendency in French history reached its climax, in the State and in Literature. There was nothing servile in the character of French Absolutism. When Louis XIV. declared," L'état c'est moi," he was only expressing epigrammatically the genius of his nation, which impelled Frenchmen, following the strongest bent in their race, instinctively to group their own brilliant qualities round the person of their Monarch. Louis XIV. was the representative of the movement towards national unity which had been always increasing in strength since the days of Louis XI. He was practically the head of the Gallican Church. He was also the feudal chief of the French nobility, whose political power he had destroyed; and while the brilliancy of their manners gave an unequalled splendour to his Court, the victories of Condé and Turenne showed what the ancient chivalry, joined with the impetuous valour of the people, could accomplish in the service of the Crown.

In like manner the Classicism of Boileau did not involve any such servile imitation of Greek and Roman forms as is found in the poets of the Italian decadence. Boileau, like the French monarchs, grounded his dictatorial edicts on the historic tendencies of French popular taste. His advice to the French poet is "Étudiez la cour, et connaissez la ville." 1 And his idea of the "good sense" which he advocates in the composition of French poetry consists in the refinement-through the study of the classic spirit in the best ancient authors-of the native metrical forms which had sprung into spontaneous existence in the early days of unconscious inspiration. He concurred with Dante in making the spoken language of the day the groundwork of the "Illustrious Vulgar Tongue." And undoubtedly this principle, consciously

or unconsciously applied, determined the character of the greatest age of French literary creation. The latter half of the seventeenth century witnessed the production of the Tragedies of Racine (1638-1699), the Comedies of Molière (1622-1673), the Fables and Tales of La Fontaine (1621-1695), the Satires of Boileau, the Sermons of Bossuet (1627-1704), the Memoirs of De Retz (16141679), the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), the Letters of Madame de Sévigné (1626-1696). In all directions the spirit of the Renaissance, co-operating with the Monarchical tendencies of the people, guided French instinct to attain a fine balance of classical expression.

Nevertheless, to a reflective observer, looking beneath the surface of this perfection of form, there was much in the reign of Louis XIV. that might have caused anxiety for the future. No doubt, as the absolute supremacy of the Crown had been attained only by a prolonged struggle, the machinery of government it had evolved, and the forms of art it had created, were still full of vigour and vitality. But in the internecine conflict of the social elements there had been no principle of compromise. The Huguenots had been politically extirpated; the nobility had been crushed; so that whatever of individual energy and local liberty sprang from the Reformation and the Feudal System no longer contributed to the life of the State. In the earlier stages of French literature, while the country was still distracted by civil and religious war, the lyric note of lofty religious and moral feeling is distinctly audible, and to a foreigner it seems that the most sublime heights of French poetry are reached in the Discours des misères de ce temps of Ronsard, and the Tragiques of D'Aubigné. But these are wanting in the art and finish characteristic of the national ideal, to secure which the great representative writers of the seventeenth century were prepared sternly to sacrifice the eccentricities of individual liberty. Malherbe set himself to define the limits within which the French Muse was supreme, and to prescribe the manner in which her various functionaries must perform their duties. Under the absolute régime of

Logic and Criticism, the old lyrical impulse died out so rapidly that, two generations later, Boileau could with confidence declare ex cathedra that the production of a modern religious epic was a poetical impossibility. Within the provinces regarded as belonging to the legitimate empire of Imagination, French taste had been trained to recognise, with perfect precision, the different proprieties of form; but it was with Poetry as with the State. Louis XIV. might indeed say with justice "L'état c'est moi"; but he did not trouble himself to anticipate how that principle would work if applied by degenerate successors; the same may be said of the critical dictatorship of Boileau; under the influence of the Renaissance, French creative invention had, within a limited area, attained so nice an equilibrium that it was impossible, as far as poetry was concerned, to make a forward move without destroying the balance of Classical Art.

In England the effects of the Classical Renaissance long remained indeterminate. The insular position of the country encouraged the centrifugal movement that ended in its separation from the Papal system. On the other hand, the temper of the people was always singularly receptive of ideas from without, and, while the reformed constitution of Church and State was still in a wavering condition, little progress was made in developing a clear form of national expression. On the whole the strongest factor in the sphere of imagination, till about the time of the Spanish Armada, was the Humanism of which Bembo was the exponent, and which aimed principally at mere external imitation of the classics. Wyatt and Surrey acclimatised the Petrarcan fashion. Ascham, Harvey, and many others wished to make our prosody conform syllabically to quantity instead of to accent and rhyme; Italian models were looked for in all directions by those who attempted to refine the language on the lines of classical antiquity.1

1 Many examples of the Italianising movement are given in vol. ii. of this History. Occasionally I seem to have understated the force of this tendency. For instance, on p. 169, I have said that Gascoigne adapted the Phænissæ of