made the coquetries of the Prior's own distant apartment all the more
reassuring. You remembered that from his ninth year he had been the
pet of princesses, the favourite of kings. Upon the cabinets,
chests, book-cases, around, were ranged the souvenirs received from
various royal persons, including three kings of France, the fair
Queen of Scots, Elizabeth of England; and the conversation fell to,
and was kept going by, the precious contents of the place where they
were sitting, the books printed and bound as they had never been
before--books which meant assiduous study, the theory of poetry with
Ronsard always accompanying its practice--delicate things of art,
which beauty had handled or might handle, the pictured faces on the
walls, in their frames of reeded ebony or jewelled filigree. There
was the Minerva, decreed him at a conference of the elegant, pedantic
"Jeux Floraux," which had proclaimed [64] Pierre de Ronsard "Prince
of Poets." The massive silver image Ronsard had promptly offered to
his patron King Charles; but in vain, for, though so greatly in want
of ready-money that he melted down church ornaments and exacted
"black" contributions from the clergy, one of the things in which
Charles had ever been sincere was a reverence for literature.

So there it stood, doing duty for Our Lady, with gothic crown and a
fresh sprig of consecrated box, bringing the odd, enigmatic
physiognomy, preferred by the art of that day, within the sphere of
religious devotion. The King's manuscript, declining, in verse
really as good as Ronsard's, the honour not meant for him, might be
read, attached to the pedestal. The ladies of his own verse, Marie,
Cassandre, and the rest, idols one after another of a somewhat
artificial and for the most part unrequited love, from the Angevine
maiden--La petite pucelle Angevine--who had vexed his young soul by
her inability to yield him more than a faint Platonic affection, down