R Bohemian, whose childhood on the shores of Sorrento had been caressed
by the kisses of an epic muse, Tasso, entered the court of the Duke of
Ferrara as Marot had that of Francis I. But less fortunate than the
lover of Diane and Marguerite, the author of "Jerusalem Delivered" paid
with his reason and the loss of his genius the audacity of his love for
a daughter of the house of Este. The religious contests and political
storms that marked the arrival of Medicis in France did not check the
soaring flight of art. At the moment when a ball struck on the scaffold
of the Fontaine des Innocents Jean Goujon who had found the Pagan chisel
of Phidias, Ronsard discovered the lyre of Pindar and founded, aided by
his pleiad, the great French lyric school. To this school succeeded the
reaction of Malherbe and his fellows, who sought to drive from the
French tongue all the exotic graces that their predecessors had tried to
nationalize on Parnassus. It was a Bohemian, Mathurin Regnier, who was
one of the last defenders of the bulwarks of poetry, assailed by the
phalanx of rhetoricians and grammarians who declared Rabelais barbarous
and Montaigne obscure. It was this same cynic, Mathurin Regnier, who,
adding fresh knots to the satiric whip of Horace, exclaimed, in
indignation at the manners of his day, "Honor is an old saint past
praying to." The roll call of Bohemia during the seventeenth century
contains a portion of the names belonging to the literature of the
reigns of Louis
