The greatest French poet of the Renaissance, he entered the household of the Duke of Orleans at the age of ten, spent three years as page of James V. of Scotland, and traveled much about Europe on various embassies. At eighteen, attacked by deafness, he withdrew to the college of Coqueret and was won to poetry by study of the ancients. It was then that a common love for the classical literatures and a common zeal for imitating their beauties in French bound him to the other young men who with him called themselves the Pleiad and set themselves to the task of renewing French literature in the image of the literatures of antiquity. In 1550, the year after the appearance of the manifesto of the young school, the _Défense et Illustration de la langue française_ of du Bellay, he published a volume of odes. His fame was instant and immense; he returned in glory to court, and for forty years the authority of his example was hardly questioned. His talent was exercised in almost all kinds of verse, chansons, sonnets, elegies, eclogues, hymns, epistles, and even in the epic, where, however, his experiment, _la Franciade_, was a complete failure, abandoned when but four of the proposed twelve cantos were finished. But his genius was essentially lyric. The ode was his special contribution to French verse; in it he followed the classical form with its divisions into strophe, antistrophe, and epode, sometimes in direct imitation of Pindar, Anacreon, Theocritus, or Horace. His best work is that in which he freed himself most fully from the influence of a model. His deepest and truest note's are those that celebrate the pleasures of this life, the delights of nature, and the inevitable "cold obstruction" of death. Works: _Odes_ and _Bocage_, 1550; _Amours_, _Odes_, book v, 1552, 1553; _Hymnes_, 1555, book ii, 1556; _Meslanges_, 1555, book ii, 1559; _Oeuvres_ (_Amours, Odes, Poèmes, Hymnes_), 4 vols., 1560; _Oeuvres_, i vol., 1584; recent editions are _Oeuvres complètes_, par P. Blanchemain, 8 vols., 1857-67 (_Bibliothèque elzévirienne_); par Marty-Laveaux, 6 vols., 1887 ff.; _Oeuvres choisies_, avec notice de Sainte-Beuve, I vol. For reference: Excellent biographical study by Marty-Laveaux in his edition of the works; Émile Faguet, _le Seizième siècle_, 1893 ; Sainte-Beuve, _Causeries du lundi_, vol. xii. 7. A CASSANDRE. 8. DESCLOSE, _opened_. 10. A POINT PERDU; _ne_ was not, and still is not always, required in the question; cf. 164, 22. VESPREE = _soir_; cf. _vêpre_. 13. LAS, _hélas_. 20. FLEURONNE= _fleurit_. 8. CHANSON. 27. AMOUR, _Cupid_. 1. CHENEVIERE = _chanvre_. 3. MY-NUD, _half naked_. 19. FOL LE PELICAN; cf. for another use of this popular notion about the pelican the famous picture in the _Nuit de mai_ of Alfred de Musset, 150, 12 _ff_. A HÉLÈNE. 26. OYANT, from _ouïr_. 27. DESJA, _déjà_. 29. BENISSANT VOSTRE NOM, etc., i.e. congratulating you on being immortalized by the poet's praise.