Something at least of the groundless scandal before referred to is
derived in all probability, if not in all certainty, from the lavish
use of hyperbole in addressing her brother; and generally speaking,
the rebuke of the Queen to Polonius, "More matter with less art," is
applicable to the whole correspondence.
Something of the same evil influence is shown in the Marguerites. It
must be remembered that the writer died before the Pleiade movement had
been fully started, and that she was older by five years than Marot,
the only one of her own contemporaries and her own literary circle who
attained to a poetic style easier, freer, and more genuine than the
cumbrous rhetoric, partly derived from the allegorising style of the
_Roman de la Rose_ and its followers, partly influenced by corrupt
following of the re-discovered and scarcely yet understood classics,
partly alloyed with Flemish and German and Spanish stiffness, of which
Chastellain, Cretin, and the rest have been the frequently quoted and
the rarely read exponents to students of French literature.
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