Ronsard is rangé now; but he has not been in that position for so very long, a considerably¹ shorter time for instance, than any one of the Elizabethans (excepting Shakespeare) with us. Sainte-Beuve was very tentative about him until the sixties, when his dubious², half-patronising air made way for a safe enthusiasm. And, even now, it can hardly be said that French critical opinion about him has crystallised; the late George Wyndham's essay shows a more convinced and better documented appreciation³ than any that we have read in French, based as it is on the instinctive⁴ sympathy which one landed gentleman who dabbles⁵ in the arts feels towards another who devotes himself to them—an admiration⁶ which does not exclude familiarity.

Indeed, it is precisely⁷ because Ronsard lends himself so superbly as an amateur to treatment by the amateur, that any attempt to approach him more closely seems to be tinged⁸ with rancour or ingratitude⁹. There is something churlish in the determination to be most on one's guard against the engaging graces of the amateur, a sense that one is behaving like the hero of a Gissing novel; but the choice is not large. One must regard Ronsard either as a charming country gentleman, or as a great historical figure in the development of French poetry, or as a poet; and the third aspect has a chance of being the most important.

Ronsard is pre-eminently the poet of a simple mind. There is nothing mysterious about him or his poetry; there is not even a perceptible thread of development in either. They are equable, constant imperturbable

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