original talent; that amidst all the execrable tricks wherein he
delighted and wherein he was a master, he possessed the sacred spark.
. . . A licentious scamp of a student, bred at some shop in the Cite
or the Place Maubert, he has a tone which, at least as much as that of
Regnier, has a savor of the places the author frequented. The beauties
whom he celebrates--and I blush for him--are none else than _la blanche
Savetiere_ (the fair cobbleress), or _la gente Saul cissiere, du coin_
(the pretty Sausage girl at the corner). But he has invented for some of
those natural regrets which incessantly recur in respect of vanished
beauty and the flight of years a form of expression, truthful, charming,
and airy, which goes on singing forever in the heart and ear of whosoever
has once heard it. He has flashes, nothing more than flashes, of
melancholy. . . . It is in reading the verses of Clement Marot that
we have, for the first time as it seems to me, a very clear and distinct
feeling of having got out from the circumbendibus of the old language,
from the Gallic tangle. We are now in France, in the land and amidst the
language of France, in the region of genuine French wit, no longer that
of the boor, or of the student, or of the burgess, but of the court and
good society. Good society, in poesy, was born with Marot, with Francis
I., and his sister Marguerite, with the Renaissance: much will still have
to be done to bring it to perfection, but it exists and will never cease
again. . . . Marot, a poet of wits rather than of genius or of great
talent, but full of grace and breeding, who has no passion, but is not
devoid of sensibility, has a way of his own of telling and saying things;
he has a turn of his own; he is, in a word, the agreeable man, the
gentleman-like man, who is bound to be pleasant and amusing, and who
discharges his duty with an easy air and unexceptionable gallantry."

There we have exactly the new character which Marot, coming between
Villon and Ronsard, gave in the sixteenth century to French poesy. We
may be more exacting than M. Sainte-Beuve; we may regret that Marot,
whilst rescuing it from the streets, confined it too much to the court;
the natural and national range of poesy is higher and more extensive than
that; the Hundred Years' War and Joan of Arc had higher claims. But it
is something to have delivered poesy from coarse vulgarity, and
introduced refinement into it. Clement Marot re