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The first man in Europe to recognize poetry of the people, and to make it a term of the dualism now in hand, was Montaigne. He discovered the thing and gave a name to it,—la poésie populaire; he praised it for its power and grace; and he brought it into line with that poetry of savages then first coming into the view of European critics. The specimen which he gave of this savage verse remained for a long time the only one commonly known in Europe; in like manner, a Lapland Lament, published in Scheffer’s Latin, came to be the conventional specimen of lowly or popular song. Montaigne, however, spoke boldly for the critical value of both kinds, savage and popular, bidding them hold up their heads in the presence of art. He praises the two extremes of poetic development, nature and simplicity on the one hand, and, on the other, noble artistic effort; for what Cotton translates as “the mongrets” he has open scorn.^[280] Along with the savage verses which he quotes in another essay^[281] he makes shrewd comments on the refrain and the dancing, shows an interest in ethnology, and even names his authorities,—“a man in my house who lived ten or twelve years in the New World,” and in smaller degree natives to whom he talked at Rouen. Now this insight, this outlook, of Montaigne are unique. Sidney, whom a German scholar^[282] praises for catholicity of taste equal to that of Montaigne and not derived from him, is too academic; he notes the areytos of America, by way of proof that rudest nations have poetry, and bursts out in that praise of “the old song of Percy and Douglas,” only to take away from its critical value by a limitation quite foreign to the spirit of Montaigne. Neither Sidney nor Puttenham,^[283] in their notice of savage and of communal poetry, came anywhere near the Frenchman’s point of view.