of Marot. In his time the Italian sonnetteers, as Petrarch, Bembo, Sanazzaro, were the prevailing models, and classical pedantry the prevailing taste. Ronsard, having filled his mind with Greek and learning, determined to be a poet, and looked about for a mistress to be the object of his songs: for a poet without a mistress was then an unheard-of anomaly. He fixed upon a beautiful woman of Blois, named Cassandre, whose Greek appellative, it is said, was her principal attraction in his fancy. To her he addressed about two hundred and twenty sonnets, in a style so lofty and pedantic, stuffed with such hard names and philosophical allusions, that the fair Cassandre must have been as wise as her namesake, the daughter of Priam, to have comprehended her own praises. Ronsard's next love was more interesting. Her name was Marie: she was beautiful and kind: the poet really loved her; and consequently, we find him occasionally descending from his heights of affectation and scholarship, to the language of truth, nature and tenderness. Marie died young; and among Ronsard's most admired poems are two or three little pieces written after her death. As his works are not commonly met with, I give one as a specimen of his style : EPITAPHE DE MARIE. Ci reposent les os de la belle Marie, Qui me fit pour un jour quitter mon Vendomois, En sa tombe repose honneur et courtoisie, Et le flambeau d'Amour, ses traits et son carquois, Tu es, belle Angevine,* un bel astre des cieux; Maintenant tu es vive, et je suis mort d'annui, Trois amis m'ont trompé,-toi, l'amour, et le monde. * Ronsard was a native of the Vendomois, and Marie, of Anjou. Ronsard had by this time acquired a reputation which eclipsed that of all his contemporaries. He was caressed and patronised by Charles the Ninth, (of hateful memory,) who, like Nero, exhibited the revolting combination of a taste for poetry and the fine arts, with the most sanguinary and depraved disposition. Ronsard, having lost his Marie, was commanded by Catherine de' Medicis to select a mistress from among the ladies of her court, to be the future object of his tuneful homage. He politely left her Majesty to choose for him, prepared to fall in love duly at the royal behest: and Catherine pointed out Helène de Surgeres, one of her maids of honour, as worthy to be the second Laura of a second Petrarch. The docile poet, with zealous obedience, warbled the praises of Helène for the rest of his life. He also consecrated to her a fountain near his château in the Vendomois, which has popularly preserved her name and fame. It is still known as the "Fontaine d'Helène." Helène was more witty than beautiful, and, though vain of the celebrity she had acquired in the verses of Ronsard, she either disliked him in the character of a lover, or was one of those lofty ladies Who hate to have their dignity profaned With any relish of an earthly thought.* She desired the Cardinal du Perron would request Ronsard (in her name) to prefix an epistle to the odes and sonnets addressed to her, assuring the world that this poetical love had been purely Platonic. "Madam," said the Cardinal, "you had better give him leave to prefix your picture."+ I presume my fair and gentle readers (I shall have none, I am sure, who are not one or the other, or both,) are as tired as myself of all this affectation, and glad to turn from it to the interest of passion and reality. "There is not," says Cowley, "so great a lie to be found in any poet, as the vulgar conceit of men, that lying Ben Jonson. +V Bayle Dictionarie Historique.-Pierre de Ronsard was born in 1524, and died in 1585. is essential to good poetry." On the contrary, where there is not truth, there is nothing Rien n'est beau que le vrai,-le vrai seul est amiable ! While the Italian school of amatory verse was flourishing in France, Spain, and England, almost to the extinction of originality in this style, the brightest light of Italian poesy had arisen, and was shining with a troubled splendour over that land of song. How swiftly at the thought does imagination shoot, "like a glancing star," over the wide expanse of sea and land, and through a long interval of sad and varied years! I am again standing within the porch of the church of San Onofrio, looking down upon the little slab in its dark corner, which covers the bones of TASSO. LEONORA D'ESTE, a princess of the proudest house in Europe, might have wedded an emperor, and have been forgotten. The idea, true or false, that she it was who broke the heart and frenzied the brain of Tasso, has glorified her to future ages; has given her a fame, something like that of the Greek of old, who bequeathed his name to immortality, by firing the grandest temple of the universe. The question of Tasso's attachment to the Princess Leonora, is, I believe, set at rest by the aoute researches and judicious reasoning of M. Ginguené, and those who have followed in his steps. A body of circumstantial evidence has been collected, which would not only satisfy a court of love-but a court of law, with a Lord Chancellor, to boot, "perpending," at the head of it. That which was once regarded as a romance, which we wished to believe, if we could, is now an established fact, which we cannot disbelieve if we would. No poet perhaps ever owed so much to female influence as Tasso, or wrote so much under the intoxicating inspiration of love and beauty. He paid most dearly for such inspiration: and yet not too dearly. The high tone of sentiment, the tenderness, and the delicacy which pervade all his poems, which prevail even in his most voluptuous descriptions, and which give him such a decided superiority over Ariosto, cannot be owing to any change of manners or increase of refinement produced by the lapse of a few years. It may be traced to the tender influence of two elegant women. He for many years read the cantos of the Gerusalemme, as he composed them, to the Princesses Lucretia and Leonora, both of whom he admired, one of whom he adored. Au reste-the kiss, which he is said to have imprinted on the lips of Leonora in a transport of frenzy, as well as the idea that she was the primary cause of his insanity and of his seven years' imprisonment at St. Anne's rest on no authority worthy of credit; yet it is not less certain that she was the object of his secret and fervent admiration, and that this hopeless passion conspired, with many other causes, to fever his irritable temperament and unsettle his imagination, beyond that "fine madness," which we are told ought "to possess the poet's brain." When Tasso first visited Ferrara, in 1565, he was just one-and-twenty, with all the advantages which a fine countenance, a majestic figure, (for he was tall even among the tallest,) noble birth, and exceeding talents could bestow he was already distinguished as the author of the Rinaldo, his earliest poem, in which he had celebrated (as if prophetically,) the Princesses d'Este, and chiefly Leo nora. : Lucrezia Estense, e l' altra i cui crin d'oro, When Tasso was first introduced to her in her brother's court, Leonora was in her thirtieth year; a disparity of age which is certainly no argument against the passion she inspired. For a young man, at his first entrance into life, to fall in love ambitiously-with a woman, for instance, who is older than himself, or with one who is, or ought to be unattainable,-is a common occurrence. Tasso, from his boyish years, had been the sworn servant of beauty. He tells us, in grave prose," che la sua giovanezza fu tutta sotto-posta all' amorose leggi," but he was also refined, even to fastidiousness, in his intercourse with women. He had formed, in his own poetical mind, the most exalted idea of what a female ought to be, and unfortunately, she who first realized all his dreams of per |