ance. Still,
after he had received so much, there is no excuse for his having
spontaneously brought death upon himself. No necessity was laid upon
God to give him more than that intermediate and even transient will,
that out of man's fall he might extract materials for his own glory.

JOACHIM DU BELLAY

Born about 1524, died in 1560; surnamed "The French Ovid"
and "The Apollo of the Pleiade"; noted as poet and prose
writer; a cousin of Cardinal du Bellay and for a time his
secretary; wrote forty-seven sonnets on the antiquities of
Rome; his most notable work in prose is his "Defense et
Illustration de la Langue Francoise."

WHY OLD FRENCH WAS NOT AS RICH AS GREEK AND LATIN[17]

If our language is not as copious or rich as the Greek or Latin, this
must not be laid to their charge, assuming that our language is not
capable in itself of being barren and sterile; but it should rather be
attributed to the ignorance of our ancestors, who, having (as some one
says, speaking of the ancient Romans) held good doing in greater
estimation than good talking and preferred to leave to their posterity
examples of virtue rather than precepts, have deprived themselves of
the glory of their great deeds, and us of their imitation; and by the
same means have left our tongue so poor and bare that it has need of
ornament and (if we may be allowed the phrase) of borrowed plumage.

[Footnote 17: From the "Defence et Illustration de la Langue
Francoise." Translated for this collection by Eric Arthur Bell. Du
Bellay belonged to a group of sixteenth-century writers known as the
Pleiade, who took upon themselves the mission of reducing the French
language, in its literary forms, to something comparable to Greek and
Latin. Mr. Saintsbury says they "made modern French--made it, we may
say, twice over"; by which he means that French, in their time, was
revolutionized, and that, in the Romantic movement of 1830, Hugo and
his associates were armed by the work of the Pleiade for their revolt
against the restraints of rule and language that had been imposed by
the eighteenth century.]

But who is willing to admit that the Greek and Roman tongues have
always possest that excellence which characterized them at the time of
Homer, Demosthenes, Virgil, and Cicero? And if these authors were of
the opinion that a little diligence and culture were incapable of
producing greater fruit, why did they make such effor