Chapter V: PIERRE RONSARD, 1524–1585. Ronsard’s early years gave little sign of

his vocation. He was for some time a page of the court, was in the service of James V. of Scotland, and had his share of shipwrecks, battles, and amorous adventures. An illness which produced total deafness made him a scholar and poet, as in another age and country it might have made him a saint and an ascetic. With all his industry, and almost religious zeal for art, he is one of the poets who make themselves, rather than are born singers. His epic, the Franciade, is as tedious as other artificial epics, and his odes are almost unreadable. We are never allowed to forget that he is the poet who read the Iliad through in three days. He is, as has been said of Le Brun, more mythological than Pindar. His constant allusion to his grey hair, an affectation which may be noticed in Shelley, is borrowed from Anacreon. Many of the sonnets in which he ‘petrarquizes,’ retain the faded odour of the roses he loved; and his songs have fire and melancholy and a sense as of perfume from ‘a closet long to quiet vowed, with mothed and dropping arras hung.’ Ronsard’s great fame declined when is Malherbe came to ‘bind the sweet influences of the Pleiad,’ but he has been duly honoured by the newest school of French poetry.