XXVI. CHAP. for the manufacture of artificial beauty, and for assuming a specious and delusive amiableness of manners. She inveighs-with great animation against chastity, which she treats as the bitterest species of slavery, and altogether contrary to the law of our nature. In this part of the poem the author has introduced a simile of a bird in a cage, which he expands with great vigour and felicity of imagination. "The bird," says he, “taken from the bright-green wood in which he was bred, and shut up in a cage, is perhaps fed with the utmost care, and provided with the most delicious morsels; he sings with every symptom of cheerfulness of heart, and his carols, which begin with the morning, terminate only with the darkness of the night: yet he desires the broad-branching woods, which nature had instructed him to love, and among which he so easily found nourishment and pastime; thither his thought is for ever turned, and all his study is how he may regain his unshackled condition; the food provided for him, urged by the passion which burns in his heart, he tramples under XXVI. foot, and traverses his cage with hasty and CHA P. impatient step, searching where he may find a hole or a chink, which might serve as a passage to his beloved liberty." L'oysel du jolys vert boscage, Et chante tant que sera vifz, A grant angoisse pourchassant, Par où voler au boys s'en puisse*. ver. 14717. We do not possess Chaucer's translation of this passage. VOL. II. CHAP. Imitated by Regnier. French poetry of the sixteenth cen tury. Marot. The lessons of John de Meun's Old-Woman, how to receive two lovers at once, without awakening suspicion in either, and how to elude the vigilance of a jealous husband, are adroit and ingenious: but they have been so often repeated, either from him or from the older writers from whom he drew them, that they would no longer exercise the power of novelty over any modern reader. The discourse of John de Meun's Old-W man has been imitated from the Roman de la Rose by Regnier, a poet of the reign of Henry IV. first monarch of the house of Bourbon, in his Thirteenth Satire, entitled Macette, ou l'Hypocrisie Déconcertée. French poetry may be said to have experienced an entire cycle of revolutions in the sixteenth century; but it never reached, in that or any subsequent period, the pregnancy of fancy and brilliancy of colouring which we recognise in William de Lorris. The beginning of the sixteenth century was the age of Marot, who is vulgarly considered as the father of French poetry, and who first gave to his native tongue that beauty of style, that XXVI. Ronsard, Du Bel lay and Du Bar. tas. winning simplicity and native eloquence, CHAP. which must always afford gratification to the reader of taste. It was the same charm which Amyot, and, with somewhat less severity of system, Montaigne, soon after gave to the French prose. The middle of the sixteenth century was a period of corruption and false taste, such as at some time or other seems to visit the literature of every country. Ronsard, and his imitators, filled their writings with pedantic allusions, with phrases borrowed from the learned languages, and with strained and unnatural ornaments, by means of which their productions are rendered in a high degree harsh and obscure. It is perhaps characteristic of works written in an ill taste, and at the same time stamped with the marks of energy and individuality of thinking, that their first success is occasionally more brilliant and astonishing than that of works, of which the excellence is sterling, and calculated to secure their reception to the latest posterity. Such is the case with Ronsard, Du Bellay and Du Bartas; of the last of whom upward of thirty editions XXVI. CHAP are said to have been printed within the space of five or six years. Malherbe. The reign of Henry IV. of France was the period in which this false taste was exploded. The two great ornaments of this period are Regnier and Malherbe. Malherbe is universally treated by the French critics as the creator of their genuine classical poetry. He gave the law which has ever since been maintained; and no French writer of verses has wandered out of the course marked for him by Malherbe, with impunity. He taught to compress a sentiment or a saying within the limits of a couplet, and by that means to take from it feebleness and prolixity, and give it zest and an aptness to be remembered. He gave to the versification of his country that degree of harmony and rythm of which it is entitled to boast; and he expressed his meaning with clearness, and what the French call elevation, Moreri, Dictionnaire, art, Du Bartas. His words are, On, n'a pas laissé d'en faire en moins de cinq ou six ans plus de vingt ou trente éditions. |