Du Bellay was second: nevertheless, when he is well known in this country it will be difficult to convince Englishmen of that truth. There is in his mind a facet which exactly corresponds to a facet of our own, and that is a quality so rare in the French classics that it will necessarily attract English readers to him: for, of all people, we nowadays criticise most in letters by the standard of our immediate emotions, and least by what was once called "reason." He was capable of that which will always be called "poignancy," and what for the moment we call "depth." He was less careful than are the majority of his countrymen to make letters an art, and so to treat his own personality as a thing apart. On the contrary, he allowed that personality to pierce through continually, so that simplicity, directness, a certain individual note as of a human being complaining--a note we know very well in our own literature--is perpetually discovered. Thus, in a spirit which all Englishmen will understand, a lightness almost sardonic lay above the depths of his grief, and the tenderness which attached to his home played around the things that go with quietude--his books and animals. I shall quote hereafter the epitaphs he wrote for his dog and for his cat, this singer of sublime and ruined things. Of the dog who-- ... allait tousjours suivant Quelquefois allait devant. Faisant ne scay quelle feste D'un gai branslement de teste. and of whom he says, in a pretty imitation of Catullus, that he-- ... maintenant pourmeine Parmy cette ombreuse plaine Dont nul ne revient vers nous. Or of the cat who was-- ... par aventure Le plus bel oeuvre que nature Fit onc en matiere de chats. All that delicate side of him we understand very well. Nor is it to modern Englishmen alone that he will appeal. He powerfully affected, it may be presumed, the English Renaissance which succeeded him. Spenser--thirty years after his death--was moved to the translation of his famous lament for Rome, and no one can read the sonnets to which he gave their final form without catching the same note in the great English cycle of the generation after him--the close of the sixteenth and the opening of the seventeenth centuries. But his verse read will prove all this and suggest much more. EXTRACTS FROM THE "ANTIQUITEZ DE ROME."