We have seen how the Pleiad, with Du Bellay and Ronsard leading, seized
upon the classics as a means of elevating the literature of France, and
how the treatise of Du Bellay which was put forth as their manifesto was
full of matter from the _Ars Poetica_, which two years previously has
served Sibilet also, whose work Du Bellay attacked. A century later,
Boileau's _L'Art Poetique_ testifies again to the inspiration of Horace,
who is made the means of riveting still more firmly upon French drama,
for good or ill, the strict rules that have always governed it; and by
the time of Boileau's death the program of the Pleiad is revived a
second time by Jean Baptiste Rousseau. Opitz and Gottsched in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are for Germany what Du Bellay and
Boileau were for France in the sixteenth and seventeenth. Literary Spain
of the latter fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was under the same
influence. The Spanish peninsula, according to Menendez y Pelayo, has
produced no fewer than forty-seven translations of the _Ars Poetica_.
Even in England, always less tractable in the matter of rules than the
Latin countries, Ben Jonson and his friends are in some sort another
Pleiad, and the treatise possesses immense authority throughout the
centuries.
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