It would be clearly improper to load this book with much general French literary history. But those who would thoroughly appreciate the position may find an endeavour to put it briefly in my _Short History_ of the subject, Book II. chaps, i., ii., and iv. (6th ed., Oxford, 1901). If they want more they had better go to MM. Darmesteter and Hatzfeld’s admirable _Seizième Siècle_ in France (Paris, 1878), or, best of all, to the last 150 pp. of the first vol. of Crepet’s _Poètes Français_. M. Ch. d’Héricault’s prefaces here, with his introduction to Marot (ed. Garnier), are not likely to be soon equalled. ----- The position of the _Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française_ may be said to be in the main assured and uncontested, nor do I think it necessary to make such a curious dictum as that it is “not in any true sense a work of literary criticism at all” the subject of much counter-argument. [Sidenote: _Du Bellay._] In that case most undoubtedly the _De Vulgari Eloquio_, of which it has been not much less strangely held to be little more than a version adapted to the latitude of Paris, is not such a work either. I think it very likely that Du Bellay knew the _De Vulgari_, which Trissino had long before published in Italian; but both the circumstances and the purpose of the two books seem to me as entirely different as their position in literary criticism seems to me absolutely secure. Whether this be so or not, Du Bellay’s circumstances are perfectly well known, and his purpose is sun-clear, alike before him and before his readers. [Sidenote: _The_ Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française.] He is justifying the vulgar tongue,[164] but he is justifying it as Ascham and his friends were doing in England; with the proviso that it shall be reformed upon, strengthened by, and altogether put to school to, the classical languages in the first place, with in the second (and here Ascham would _not_ have agreed) Italian and even Spanish. His dealing is no doubt titularly and ostensibly directed to the language; but his anxieties are wholly concentrated on the language _as the organ of literature_—and specially of poetry. That he made a mistake in turning his back, with the scorn he shows, on the older language itself, and even on the verse-forms which had so long occupied it, is perfectly true. This is the besetting sin of the Renaissance—its special form of that general sin which, as we said at the outset, doth so easily beset every age. But his scheme for the improvement is far more original; and, except in so far as it may have been faintly suggested by a passage of Quintilian,[165] had not, so far as I know, been anticipated by any one in ancient or modern times. Unlike Sibilet, and unlike preceding writers generally, he did not believe so very much in translation—seeing justly that by it you get the matter, but nothing, or at least not much, more.[166] He did not believe in the mere “imitation” of the ancients either.