Produced by Ted Garvin, Renald Levesque and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net AVRIL BEING ESSAYS ON THE POETRY OF THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE BY H. BELLOC "... _Ceux dont la Fantaisie Sera religieuse et devote envers Dieu Tousjours acheveront quelque grant Poesie, Et dessus leur renom la Parque n'aura lieu._" LONDON DUCKWORTH AND CO. 3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVE NT GARDEN, W.C. 1904 CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. Part of this book originally appeared in "The Pilot," and is here reprinted by kind permission of the Editor. CONTENTS CHARLES OF ORLEANS VILLON MAROT RONSARD Du BELLAY MALHERBE DEDICATION TO F.Y. ECCLES MY DEAR ECCLES, You will, I know, permit me to address you these essays which are more the product of your erudition than of my enthusiasm. With the motives of their appearance you are familiar. We have wondered together that a society so avid of experience and enlargement as is ours, should ignore the chief expression of its closest neighbour, its highest rival and its coheir in Europe: should ignore, I mean, the literature of the French. We have laughed together, not without despair, to see the mind of England, for all its majesty and breadth, informed at the most critical moments in the policy of France by such residents of Paris as were at the best fanatical, at the worst (and most ordinary) corrupt. Seeing around us here a philosophy and method drawn from northern Germany, a true and subtle sympathy with the Italians, and a perpetual, just and accurate comment upon the minor nationalities of Europe, a mass of recorded travel superior by far to that of other countries, we marvelled that France in particular should have remained unknown.