ts to bring it to
the pitch of perfection it is in to-day? I can say the same thing of
our language, which is now beginning to bloom without bearing fruit,
like a plant which has not yet flowered, waiting till it can produce
all the fruit possible. This is certainly not the fault of nature who
has rendered it more sterile than the others, but the fault of those
who have tended it, and have not cultivated it sufficiently. Like a
wild plant which grows in the desert, without ever being watered or
pruned or protected by the trees and shrubs which give it shade, it
fades and almost dies.

If the ancient Romans had been so negligent of the culture of their
language when first they began to develop it, it is certain that they
could not have become so great in so short a time. But they, in the
guise of good agriculturists, first of all transplanted it from a wild
locality to a cultivated one, and then in order that it might bear
fruit earlier and better, cut away several useless shoots and
substituted exotic and domestic ones, mostly drawn from the Greek
language, which have grafted so well on to the trunk that they appear
no longer adopted but natural. Out of these have sprung, from the
Latin tongue, flowers and colored fruits in great number and of much
eloquence, all of which things, not so much from its own nature but
artificially, every tongue is wont to produce. And if the Greeks and
Romans, more diligent in the culture of their tongue than we are in
ours, found an eloquence in their language only after much labor and
industry, are we for this reason, even if our vernacular is not as
rich as it might be, to condemn it as something vile and of little
value?

The time will come perhaps, and I hope it will be for the good of the
French, when the language of this noble and powerful kingdom (unless
with France the whole French language is to be buried),[18] which is
already beginning to throw out its roots, will shoot out of the ground
and rise to such a height and size that it will even emulate that of
the Greeks and the Romans, producing like them, Homers, Demostheneses,
Virgils, and Ciceros, in the same way that France has already produced
her Pericles, Alcibiades, Themistocles, and Scipio.

[Footnote 18: Du Bellay here refers to the unhappy political state of
France during his short life of thirty-six years. He was born one year
before the defeat of Francis I at Pavia. When twenty years old, Henry
VIII in league with