Charles IX. gave him rooms in the palace; he bestowed upon him divers abbacies and priories ; and he called him and regarded him constantly as his master in poetry. Neither was Charles IX.
a bad poet. This royal patronage excited violent dislike to Ron sard on the part of the Huguenots, who wrote constant pas quinades against him, strove (by a ridiculous exaggeration of the Dionysiac festival at Arcueil, in which the friends had indulged to celebrate the success of the first French tragedy, Jodelle's Cleopatre) to represent him as a libertine and an atheist, and (which seems to have annoyed him more than anything else) set up his follower Du Bartas as his rival. According to some words of his own, which are quite credible considering the ways of the time, they were not contented with this variety of argument, but attempted to have him assassinated.
During this period Ronsard's work was considerable but mostly occasional, and the one work of magnitude upon which Charles put him, the Franciade (1572), has never been ranked, even by his most devoted admirers, as a chief title to fame. The metre (the decasyllable) which the king chose could not but contrast unfavourably with the magnificent alexandrines which Du Bartas and Agrippa d'Aubigne were shortly to produce; the general plan is feebly classical, and the very language has little or nothing of that racy mixture of scholarliness and love of natural beauty which distinguishes the best work of the Pleiade. Moreover it had the singular bad luck almost to coincide with the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, which had occurred about a fortnight before its publication. The death of Charles made little difference in the court favour which Ronsard enjoyed, but, combined with his in creasing infirmities, it seems to have determined him to quit court life. During his last days he lived chiefly at his house in Ven dome, the capital of his native province, at his abbey at Croix Val in the same neighbourhood, or else at Paris, where he was usually the guest of Jean Galland, well known as a scholar, at the College de Boncourt. It seems also that he had a town house of his own in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. He received gifts and endowments from foreign patrons, including Elizabeth of Eng land. Mary, queen of Scots, who had known him earlier, ad dressed him from her prison ; and Tasso consulted him on the Gerusalemme. He died at his priory of Saint-Cosme at Tours, and he was buried in the church of that name on Dec. 27, 1585.
After Ronsard's death the classical reaction set in under the auspices of Malherbe. After Malherbe the rising glory of Cor neille and his contemporaries obscured the tentative and unequal work of the Pleiade, which was, moreover, directly attacked by Boileau himself, the dictator of French criticism in the last half of the 17th century. Then Ronsard was, except by a few men of taste, like La Bruyere and Fenelon, forgotten when he was not sneered at. In this condition he remained during the whole 18th century and the first quarter of the i9th. The Romantic
revival, seeing in him a victim of its special bete noire Boileau, and attracted by his splendid diction, rich metrical faculty, and combination of classical and mediaeval peculiarities, adopted his name as a kind of battle-cry, and for the moment exaggerated his merits somewhat. The critical work, however, of Sainte Beuve in his Tableau de la litterature francaise au I6eme siecle, established his place in French literature.
Generally speaking, Ronsard is hest in his amatory verse (the long series of sonnets and odes to Cassandre, Marie, Genevre, Helene--Helene de Surgeres, a later and mainly "literary" love —etc.), and in his descriptions of the country (the famous "Mignonne allons voir si la rose," the "Fontaine Bellerie," the "Fork. de Gastine," and so forth), which have an extraordinary grace and freshness. No one used with more art than he the graceful diminutives which his school set in fashion. He knew well too how to manage the gorgeous adjectives ("marbriner "cinabrine," "ivoirine" and the like) which were another fancy of the Pleiade, and in his hands they rarely become stiff or cum brous. In short, Ronsard shows eminently the two great attrac tions of French i6th-century poetry as compared with that of the two following ages—magnificence of language and imagery and graceful variety of metre.