There is little possibility of difference of opinion as to the striking critical moment presented to us by the juxtaposition, [Sidenote: _Sibilet._] with but a single twelvemonth between, of Sibilet and Du Bellay. The importance of this movement is increased, not lessened, by the fact that Sibilet himself is by no means such a copyist of Gratien du Pont as Du Pont is of Fabri, and Fabri of the unknown “Unfortunate,” and the “Unfortunate” of all his predecessors to Deschamps. He does repeat the lessons of the _Rhetorics_ as to verse and rhyme, and so forth. He has no doubt about the excellence of that “equivocal” rhyme to which France yet clings, though it has always been unpleasing to an English ear. And (though with an indication that they are passing out of fashion) he admits the most labyrinthine intricacies of the ballade and its group.[162] ----- Footnote 162: With the Lyons reprint (_v. infra_) of Sibilet and the _Quintil Horatien_ is given an _Autre Art Poétique_, short and strictly practical. It notices Ronsard, but gives the old forms. ----- But he is far indeed from stopping here. He was (and small blame to him) a great admirer of Marot, and he had already learnt to distrust that outrageous “aureation” of French with Greek and Latin words which the _rhétoriqueurs_ had begun, which the intermediate school of Scève and Heroet were continuing,[163] and which the _Pléiade_, though with an atoning touch of elegance and indeed of poetry, was to maintain and increase, in the very act of breaking with other _rhétoriqueur_ traditions. He delights in Marot’s own epigrams, and in the sonnets of Mellin de Saint-Gelais; and he is said to have anticipated Ronsard in the adoption of the term “ode” in French, though his odes are not in the least Pindaric (as for the matter of that Ronsard’s are not). The epistle and the elegy give fresh intimation of his independent following of the classics, and he pays particular attention to the eclogue, dwells on the importance of the “version” (translation from Greek or Latin into French verse), and in the opening of his book is not very far from that half-Platonic, half anti-Platonic, deification of Poetry which is the catch-cry of the true Renaissance critic everywhere. There is not very much real, and probably still less intentional, innovation or revolt in Sibilet; and it is precisely this that makes him so valuable. Fabri and Gratien du Pont are merely of the old: in no important way do the form and pressure of the coming time set their mark on them. Du Bellay is wholly of the new: he is its champion and crusader, full of scorn for the old. Sibilet, between them, shows, uncontentiously, the amount of leaning towards sometimes revised or exotic novelty, and away from immediate and domestic antiquity, which influenced the generation. ----- Footnote 163: