It might be said of
the first that he stood a symbol for the wheat and corn-land of the
Vendomois, and of the second, that he recalled that subtle wine of the
southern Loire to which Chinon gives the most famous label.

Du Bellay was second: nevertheless, when he is well known in this
country it will be difficult to convince Englishmen of that truth. There
is in his mind a facet which exactly corresponds to a facet of our own,
and that is a quality so rare in the French classics that it will
necessarily attract English readers to him: for, of all people, we
nowadays criticise most in letters by the standard of our immediate
emotions, and least by what was once called "reason." He was capable of
that which will always be called "poignancy," and what for the moment we
call "depth." He was less careful than are the majority of his
countrymen to make letters an art, and so to treat his own personality
as a thing apart. On the contrary, he allowed that personality to pierce
through continually, so that simplicity, directness, a certain
individual note as of a human being complaining--a note we know very
well in our own literature--is perpetually discovered.

Thus, in a spirit which all Englishmen will understand, a lightness
almost sardonic lay above the depths of his grief, and the tenderness
which attached to his home played around the things that go with
quietude--his books and animals. I shall quote hereafter the epitaphs he
wrote for his dog and for his cat, this singer of sublime and ruined
things.

Of the dog who--

... allait tousjours suivant
Quelquefois allait devant.
Faisant ne scay quelle feste
D'un gai branslement de teste.

and of whom he says, in a pretty imitation of Catullus, that he--

... maintenant pourmeine
Parmy cette ombreuse plaine
Dont nul ne revient vers nous.

Or of the cat who was--

... par aventure
Le plus bel oeuvre que nature
Fit onc en matiere de chats.

All that delicate side of him we understand very well.

Nor is it to modern Englishmen alone that he will appeal. He powerfully
affected, it may be presumed, the English Renaissance which succeeded
him. Spenser--thirty years after his death--was moved to the translation
of his famous lament for Rome, and no one can read the sonnets to which
he gave their final form without catching the same note in the great
English cycle of the generati