ets. These studies came too late to make him what he so much desired
to be, a trifler in Greek and Latin verse, like so many others of his
time now forgotten; instead, they made him a lover of his own homely
native tongue, that poor starveling stock of the French language. It was
through this fortunate shortcoming in his education that he became
national and modern; and he learned afterwards to look back on that wild
garden of his youth with only a half regret. A certain Cardinal du
Bellay was the successful member of the family, a man often employed in
high official affairs. It was to him that the thoughts of Joachim turned
when it became necessary to choose a profession, and in 1552 he
accompanied the Cardinal to Rome. He remained there nearly five years,
burdened with the weight of affairs, and languishing with home-sickness.
Yet it was under these circumstances that his genius yielded its best
fruits. From Rome, which to most men of an imaginative temperament such
as his would have yielded so many pleasurable sensations, with all the
curiosities of the Renaissance still fresh there, his thoughts went back
painfully, longingly, to the country of the Loire, with its wide
expanses of waving corn, its homely pointed roofs of grey slate, and its
far-off scent of the sea. He reached home at last, but only to die
there, quite suddenly, one wintry day, at the early age of thirty-five.

Much of Du Bellay's poetry illustrates rather the age and school to
which he belonged than his own temper and genius. As with the writings
of Ronsard and the other poets of the Pleiad, its interest depends not
so much on the impress of individual genius upon it, as on the
circumstance that it was once poetry a la mode, that it is part of the
manner of a time--a time which made much of manner, and carried it to a
high degree of perfection. It is one of the decorations of an age which
threw much of its energy into the work of decoration. We feel a pensive
pleasure in seeing these faded decorations, and observing how a group of
actual men and women pleased themselves long ago. Ronsard's poems are a
kind of epitome of his age. Of one side of that age, it is true, of the
strenuous, the progressive, the serious movement, which was then going
on, there is little; but of the catholic side, the losing side, the
forlorn hope, hardly a figure is absent. The Queen of Scots, at whose
desire Ronsard published his odes, reading him in her northern prison,
fe