Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/876

Rh 842 R N R 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 Fraiiciade, has never been ranked, even by his most devoted admirers, as a chief title to fame. The metre (the decasyllabic) 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. The poem could never have had an abiding success, but at its appearance it had the singular bad luck almost to coincide with the massacre of St Bartholomew, which had occurred about a fortnight before its publication. One party in the state were certain to look coldly on the work of a minion of the court at such a juncture, the other had something else to think of. The death of Charles made, indeed, little difference in the court favour which Ronsard enjoyed, but, combined with his increasing infirmities, it seems to have determined him to quit court life. During his last year he lived chiefly at a house which he possessed in Yendome, 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. At any rate .his preferments made him in perfectly easy circumstances, and he seems neither to have derived nor wished for any profit from his books. A half-jocular suggestion that his publisher should give him money to buy " du bois pour se chauffer in return for his last revision of his (Euvres Completes is the only trace of any desire of the kind. On the other hand he received not merely gifts and endowments from his own sovereign but presents from many others, including Elizabeth of England. His last years were, however, saddened not merely by the death of many of his most intimate friends, but by constant and increasing ill health. This did not interfere with his literary work in point of quality, for he was rarely idle, and some of his latest work is among his best. But he indulged (what few poets have wisely indulged) the tempta- tion of constantly altering his work, and many of his later altera- tions are by no means for the better. Towards the end of 1585 his condition of health grew worse and worse, and he seems to have moved restlessly from one of his houses to another for some months. When the end came, which, though in great pain, he met in a resolute and religious manner, he was at his priory of Saint Cosme at Tours, and he was buried in the church of that name on Friday, December 27. The character and fortunes of Ronsard's works are among the most remarkable in literary history, and supply in themselves a kind of illustration of the progress of French literature during the last three centuries. It was his fortune to be almost always extra- vagantly admired or violently attacked, and it is only recently that he has been set in his proper place. At first, as has been said, the enmity, not altogether unprovoked, of the friends and followers of Marot fell to his lot, then the still fiercer antagonism of the Huguenot faction, who, happening to possess a poet of great merit in Du Bartas, were able to attack Ronsard in his tenderest point, that of his reputation as the greatest living French poet. But fate had by no means done its worst with him in his lifetime. After his death the classical reaction set in under the auspices of Malherbe, a man of correct and narrow spirit who seems to have been animated with a sort of personal hatred of Ronsard, though it is not clear that they ever met. After Malherbe (who by no means himself produced the effect which some well-known but quite unhistorical lines of Boileau Would convey) the rising glory of Corneille and his contemporaries obscured the tentative and equal 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 con- dition he remained during the whole 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th. 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, first of Sainte-Beuve in his Tableau de la Literature Fran<;aise au 16eme Sieclc, and since of others, has established Ronsard pretty securely in his right place, a place which may be defined in a few sentences. For the general position of the Pleiade reference may be made to the article on the literature of FRANCE (vol. ix. p. 650). Ronsard, its acknowledged chief and its most voluminous poet, was probably also its best, though a few isolated pieces of Belleau excel him in airy lightness of touch. Several sonnets of Du Bellay exhibit what may be called the intense and voluptuous melancholy of the Renaissance more perfectly than anything of his, and the thirst passages of the Tragiqms and the Divine Sepmaiiie surpass his work in command of the alexandrine and in power of turning it to the purposes of satirical invective and descriptive narration. But that work is, as has been said, very extensive (we possess at a rough guess not much short of a hundred thousand lines of his), and it is extraordinarily varied in form. He did not introduce the sonnet into France, but he practised it very soon after its introduction and with admirable skill the famous " Quand vous serez bien vieille " being one of the acknowledged gems of French literature. His odes, which are very numerous, are also very in- teresting and in their best shape very perfect compositions. He began by imitating the strophic arrangement of the ancients, but very soon had the wisdom to desert this for a kind of adjustment of the Horatian ode to rhyme, instead of exact quantitative metre. In this latter kind he devised some exquisitely melodious rhythms of which, till our own day, the secret died with the 17th century. His more sustained work sometimes displays a bad selection of metre; and his occasional poetry epistles, eclogues, elegies, &c. is injured by its vast volume. But the preface to the Franciadeis a 'very tine piece of verse, far superior (it is in alexandrines) to the poem itself. Generally speaking, Ronsard is best in his amatory verse (the long series of sonnets and odes to Cassandre, Marie, Genevre, Helene, &c.), and in his descriptions of the country (the famous " Mignonne allons voir si la rose," the " Fontaine Bellerie," the " Foret de Gastine," and so forth), which have an extraordinary grace and freshness. No one used with more art than he the grace- ful diminutives which his school set in fashion. He knew well too how to manage the gorgeous adjectives ("marbrine," "ciuabrine," " ivoirine,"and the like) which were another fancy of the Pleiade, and in his hands they rarely become stiff or cumbrous. In short, Ronsard shows eminently the two great attractions of French 17th- century poetry as compared with that of the two following ages, magnificence of language and imagery and graceful variety of metre. The chief separately published works of Ronsard are noted above. He pro- duced, however, during his life a vast number of separate publications, some of them mere pamphlets or broadsheets which from time to time he collected, often striking out others at the same time, in the successive editions of his works. Of these he himself published seven the first in 1500, the last in 1084. Between his death and the year 16-30 ten more complete editions were published, the most famous of which is the folio of 1609. A copy of this presented by Sainte-Beuve to Victor Hugo, and now in the possession of M. Slaxime du Camp, lias a place of its own in French literary history. From 1630 Ronsard was not again reprinted for more than two centuries. Just before the close of the second, however, Sainte-Beuve printed a selection of his poems at the end of the above-mentioned Tableau. There are also selections by 31. Noel (in the Collection Didot) and Becq de Fouquieres. In 1857 31. Prosper Blanchemain, who had previously pub- lished a volume of (Euvres Jnedites de Ronsard, undertook a complete edition for the Bibliotheque ElzMrienne. The eighth and last volume of this appeared ton years later. It is practically complete; a few pieces of a somewhat free character which are ascribed with some certainty to the poet are, however, excluded. The chief separate volume of criticism on Ronsard is that of 31. Gandar (Metz. 1854), which considers him chiefly in his relation to the ancients. (G. SA.) RONSDORF, a town in north-western Prussia, on the Morsbach, a small affluent of the Rhine, 18 miles west of Diisseldorf, contains considerable iron and brass works, foundries, and wire-works, besides carrying on extensive manufactures of ribbons, trimmings, and similar goods. The population in 1880 was 10,100. Founded in 1737 by the followers of Elias Eller, a religious en- thusiast, Ronsdorf received town-rights in 1745. The Ronsdorf sect, the members of which called themselves Zionites, is now extinct. ROOF. See BUILDING and DOME. ROOK (Anglo-Saxon 11 roc, Icelandic Hrokr, 1 Swedish Raka, Dutch Roek, Gaelic Rocas), the Conms frugilegus of ornithology, and throughout a great part of Europe the commonest and best-known of the Crow-tribe. Besides its pre-eminently gregarious habits, which did not escape the notice of Virgil (Georg. i. 382) 2 and are so unlike those of nearly every other member of the Coi-videe, the Rook is at once distinguishable from the rest by commonly losing at an early age the feathers from its face, leaving a bare, scabrous, and greyish-white skin that is sufficiently visible at some distance. In the comparatively rare cases 1 The bird, however, does not inhabit Iceland, and the language to which the name belongs would perhaps be more correctly termed Old Teutonic. From this word is said to come the French Freux. There are many local German names of the same origin, such as Rooke, Jtouch, Ruch, and others, but the bird is generally known in Germany as the Saat-KraJie, i.e., Seed- ( = Corn-) Crow. 2 This is the more noteworthy as the district in which he was born and educated is almost the only part of Italy in which the Rook breeds. Shelley also very truly specoks of the " legioned Rooks " to which lie stood listening "mid the mountains Euganean."