rch, but in his rendering of the _Daphnis et Chloe_ of Longus,
and other works, was exquisite; but still more admirable was his sense
of the capacities of French prose. He divined with a rare instinct
the genius of the language; he felt the affinities between his Greek
original and the idioms of his own countrymen; he rather re-created
than translated Plutarch. "We dunces," wrote Montaigne, "would have
been lost, had not this book raised us from the mire; thanks to it,
we now venture to speak and write; ... it is our breviary." The life
and the ideas of the ancient world became the possession, not of
scholars only, but of all French readers. The book was a school of
manners and of thought, an inspirer of heroic deeds. "To love
Plutarch," said the greatest Frenchman of the century, Henry of
Navarre, "is to love me, for he was long the master of my youth."

It was such an interest in the life and ideas of antiquity as Amyot
conveyed to the general mind of France that was wanting to Ronsard
and the group of poets surrounding him. Their work was concerned
primarily with literary form; of the life of the world and general
ideas, apart from form, they took too little heed. The transition
from Marot to Ronsard is to be traced chiefly through the school of
Lyons. In that city of the South, letters flourished side by side
with industry and commerce; Maurice Sceve celebrated his mistress
Delie, "object of the highest virtue," with Petrarchan ingenuities;
and his pupil LOUISE LABE, "la belle Cordiere," sang in her sonnets
of a true passion felt, as she declares, "en ses os, en son sang,
en son ame." The Lyonese poets, though imbued with Platonic ideas,
rather carry on the tradition of Marot than announce the Pleiade.
PIERRE DE RONSARD, born at a chateau a few leagues from Vendome, in
the year 1524, was in the service of the sons of Francis I. as page,
was in Scotland with James V., and later had the prospect of a
distinguished diplomatic career, when deafness, consequent on a
serious malady, closed for him the avenue to public life. He threw
himself ardently into the study of letters; in company with the boy
Antoine de Baif he received lessons from an excellent Hellenist, Jean
Daurat, soon to be principal of the College Coqueret. At the College
a group of students--Ronsard, Baif, Joachim du Bellay, Remi
Belleau--gathered about the master. The "Brigade" was formed, which,
by-and-by, with the addition of Jodelle and Pontus de Thyard