ith the double crescent, and all
the works of Anne of Brittany with the knotted cord, they called
themselves the Pleiad; seven in all, although, as happens with the
celestial Pleiad, if you scrutinise this constellation of poets more
carefully you may find there a great number of minor stars.

The first note of this literary revolution was struck by Joachim du
Bellay in a little tract written at the early age of twenty-four, which
coming to us through three centuries seems of yesterday, so full is it
of those delicate critical distinctions which are sometimes supposed
peculiar to modern writers. The piece has for its title La Deffense et
Illustration de la langue Francoyse; and its problem is how to
illustrate or ennoble the French language, to give it lustre. We are
accustomed to speak of the varied critical and creative movement of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the Renaissance, and because we
have a single name for it we may sometimes fancy that there was more
unity in the thing itself than there really was. Even the Reformation,
that other great movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had
far less unity, far less of combined action, than is at first sight
supposed; and the Renaissance was infinitely less united, less conscious
of combined action, than the Reformation. But if anywhere the
Renaissance became conscious, as a German philosopher might say, if ever
it was understood as a systematic movement by those who took part in it,
it is in this little book of Joachim du Bellay's, which it is impossible
to read without feeling the excitement, the animation, of change, of
discovery. "It is a remarkable fact," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "and an
inversion of what is true of other languages, that, in French, prose has
always had the precedence over poetry." Du Bellay's prose is perfectly
transparent, flexible, and chaste. In many ways it is a more
characteristic example of the culture of the Pleiad than any of its
verse; and those who love the whole movement of which the Pleiad is a
part, for a weird foreign grace in it, and may be looking about for a
true specimen of it, cannot have a better than Joachim du Bellay and
this little treatise of his.

Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existing French culture to the
rediscovered classical culture; and in discussing this problem, and
developing the theories of the Pleiad, he has lighted upon many
principles of permanent truth and applicability. There were s