Excerpt from Ronsard La Pleiade: With Selections From Their Poetry and Some Translations in the Original Metres I need not dwell on the age in which they wrote. It is enough for my purpose to say that the age of Ronsard exhibited, in the vigour of their prime, new ideas of monarchy, nationality, and religion, which breaking up, and breaking away from, old ideas of feudalism, the empire, and the papacy, induced an era of gorgeous embassies in the place of local war waged under sordid conditions. The Alps had been levelled for ever when, on the last day of the year 1494, the army of Charles VIII. Entered Rome Thenceforward, until the fatal day of Pavia, \ Italy was the ring in which the houses of France and Austria wrestled for the headship of Christendom. Italy, the turning-point in the welter of war and diplomacy, became a vortex, sucking in streams of courage and intellect from all Europe. Never had there been such contact between contemporary civilisations. But this wide embrace of the present was not all. Of modern countries Italy remembered most of the classic past had always remembered it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.