One there was among them, the youngest, of whose genial fame to come
this experienced judge of men and books, two years before "St.
Bartholomew's," was confident--a crowned boy, King Charles himself.
Here perhaps was the single entirely disinterested sentiment of the
poet's life, wholly independent of a long list of benefits, or
benefices; for the younger had turned winsomely, appealingly, to the
elder, who, forty years of age, feeling chilly at the thought, had no
son. And of one only of those companions did the memory bring a
passing cloud. It was long ago, on a journey, that he had first
spoken, accidentally, with Joachim du Bellay, whose friendship had
been the great intellectual fortune of his life. For a moment one
saw the encounter at the wayside inn, in the broad, gay morning, a
quarter of a century since; and there was the face--deceased at
thirty-five. Pensive, plaintive, refined by sickness, of exceeding
delicacy, it must from the first have been best suited to the
greyness of an hour like this. To-morrow, where will be the snow?

The leader in that great poetic battle of the Pleiad, their host
himself (he explained the famous device, and named the seven chief
stars in the constellation) was depicted appropriately, in veritable
armour, with antique Roman cuirass of minutely inlaid gold, and
flowered mantle; [67] the crisp, ceremonial, laurel-wreath of the
Roman conqueror lying on the audacious, over-developed brows, above
the great hooked nose of practical enterprise. In spite of his
pretension to the Epicurean conquest of a kingly indifference of
mind, the portrait of twenty years ago betrayed, not less than the
living face with its roving, astonished eyes, the haggard soul of a
haggard generation, whose eagerly-sought refinements had been after
all little more than a theatrical make-believe--an age of wild