e present pavement, has destroyed the record of his
grave; I believe it to lie in the southern part of the ambulatory.

In this abrupt descent, following upon so fierce an activity of thought,
he prefigured, I say, the close of the Renaissance as his genius
typified its living spirit; for all the while, as you read him, you see
the cloud about his head, and the profound, though proud and constant,
sadness of his eyes.

This, also, was pure Renaissance in him, that the fields in which he
wandered, and which he loved to sing--a man of elegies--were dominated
by the awful ruins of Rome. These it was that lent him his gravity, and
perhaps oppressed him. He sang them also with a comprehension of the
superb.

He was second to Ronsard. Though he was the sharp voice of the Pleiade,
though it was he who published their famous manifesto, though his
scholarship was harder, though his energy could run more fiercely to one
point and shine there more brilliantly in one small climax; yet he was
second. He himself thought it of himself, and called himself a disciple.
All up and down his works you find an astonished admiration directed
towards his greater friend--

... Un amy que les Dieux
Guydent si hault au sentier des plus vieux.

Or again--

Divin Ronsard qui de l'arc a sept cordes
Tiras premier au but de la memoire
Les traicts ailez de la Francoise gloire.

Everywhere it is his friend rather than he that has touched the mark of
the gods and called up from the tomb the ghost of Rome which all that
company worshipped.

I say he saw himself that he was second. Old Durat saw it clearly in
that little college of poets where he taught the unteachable thing: De
Baif, Belleau--all the comrades would have taken it for granted. Ronsard
led and was chief, because he had the firm largeness, the laughter and
the permanence which are the marks of those who determine the fortunes
of the French in letters or in arms. Ronsard made. His verses, in their
great mass and unfailing level, were but one example of the power that
could produce a school, call up a general enthusiasm, and for forty
years govern the taste of his country. There was in him something
public, in Du Bellay something domestic and attached, as in the
relations of a king and of a herald. Or again, the one was like an
ordered wood with a rich open plain about it, the other was like a
garden. Ronsard was the Beauce; Du Bellay was Anjou.