were to perish, or to vanish with Menander’s men and women!  We cannot think of our world without them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem more essential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms.  May we not almost welcome ‘Free Education’? for every Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more for you.

III.

To Pierre de Ronsard
 (Prince of Poets.)

Master and Prince of Poets,—­As we know what choice thou madest of a sepulchre (a choice how ill fulfilled by the jealousy of Fate), so we know well the manner of thy chosen immortality.  In the Plains Elysian, among the heroes and the ladies of old song, there was thy Love with thee to enjoy her paradise in an eternal spring.

  La’ du plaisant Avril la saison imortelle
   Sans eschange le suit,
  La terre sans labeur, de sa grasse mamelle,
   Tout chose y produit;
  D’enbas la troupe sainte autrefois amoureuse,
   Nous honorant sur tous,
  Viendra nous saluer, s’estimant bien-heureuse
   De s’accointer de nous.

There thou dwellest, with the learned lovers of old days, with Belleau, and Du Bellay, and Bai’f, and the flower of the maidens of Anjou.  Surely no rumour reaches thee, in that happy place of reconciled affections, no rumour of the rudeness of Time, the despite of men, and the change which stole from thy locks, so early grey, the crown of laurels and of thine own roses.  How different from thy choice of a sepulchre have been the fortunes of thy tomb!

  I will that none should break
  The marble for my sake,
  Wishful to make more fair
    My sepulchre.

So didst thou sing, or so thy sweet numbers run in my rude English.  Wearied of Courts and of priories, thou didst desire a grave beside thine own Loire, not remote from

  The caves, the founts that fall
  From the high mountain wall,
   That fall and flash and fleet,
    Wilh silver fret.

  Only a laurel tree
  Shall guard the grave of me;
   Only Apollo’s bough
    Shall shade me now!

Far other has been thy sepulchre:  not in the free air, among the field flowers, but in thy priory of Saint Cosme, with marble for a monument, and no green grass to cover thee.  Restless wert thou in thy life; thy dust was not to be restful in thy death.  The Huguenots, ces nouveaux Chre’tiens qui la France ont pille’e, destroyed thy tomb, and the warning of the later monument,

 ABI, NEFASTE, QUAM CALCAS HUMUM SACRA EST,

has not scared away malicious men.  The storm that passed over France a hundred years ago, more terrible than the religious wars that thou didst weep for, has swept the column from the tomb.  The marble was broken by violent hands, and the shattered sepulchre of the Prince of Poets gained a dusty hospitality from the museum of a country town.  Better had been the laurel of thy desire, the creeping vine, and the ivy tree.