Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas[200], the 'Protestant Ronsard,' was born in 1544 at Montfort, near Auch, served Henry of Navarre in war and diplomacy, was wounded at Ivry, and died of his wounds in 1590. His first work was _Judith_; then followed _La Premiere Semaine_, and next _Uranie_, _Le Triomphe de la Foi_, and the _Seconde Semaine_. He also wrote numerous smaller poems, including one on the battle of Ivry. The 'First Week of Creation' is his greatest and most famous work. It went through thirty editions in a few years; was translated into English by Sylvester, gave not a little inspiration to Milton, and was warmly admired by Goethe. Ronsard at first eagerly welcomed Du Bartas; but his jealousy being aroused by the pretensions of the Calvinist party to set up their poet as a rival to himself, he resented this in an indignant and vigorous address to Daurat, which contains some very just criticisms on Du Bartas. Nevertheless the merits of the latter are extremely great, and his personage and work very interesting. It has been said of him that he represents, in the first place, the extreme development of the Ronsardising innovation; in the second place, the highest literary culture attained by the French Calvinists. Inferior to D'Aubigne in knowledge of the world, in the choice of subjects perennially interesting, and in terse vigour of expression, Du Bartas was the superior of the great Protestant satirist in picturesqueness, in imagination, and in facility of descriptive power. The stately and gorgeous abundance of the vocabulary with which the Hellenising and Latinising innovations of the Pleiade enriched the French language supplied him with colours and material to work with, and his own genius did the rest. His attempt to naturalise Greek compounds, such as 'Aime-Lyre,' 'Donne-Ame,' and the rest, has done him more harm than anything else; but his combination of classical learning, with the varied colour and vivid imagination of the middle age and the Renaissance, often results in extraordinarily striking expressions. _L'Eschine azuree_, for instance, is a singularly picturesque, if also somewhat barbaric, reminiscence of [Greek: eurea nota thalasses]: the enforcement of the idea of _hora novissima tempora pessima_ in the four following lines is admirable:-- Nos execrables moeurs, dedans Gomorrhe apprises, Les troublees saisons, les civiles fureurs, Les menaces du ciel, sont les avant-coureurs De Christ, qui vient tenir ses dernieres assises. In such a passage again as the following, the power and simplicity of the diction can escape no reader; the piling up of the strokes is worthy of Victor Hugo:-- Les etoiles cherront. Le desordre, la nuict, La frayeur, le trespas, la tempeste, le bruit, Entreront en quartier.