JOACHIM DU BELLAY Born about 1524, died in 1560; surnamed "The French Ovid" and "The Apollo of the Pléiade"; noted as poet and prose writer; a cousin of Cardinal du Bellay and for a time his secretary; wrote forty-seven sonnets on the antiquities of Rome; his most notable work in prose is his "Défense et Illustration de la Langue Françoise." WHY OLD FRENCH WAS NOT AS RICH AS GREEK AND LATIN[17] If our language is not as copious or rich as the Greek or Latin, this must not be laid to their charge, assuming that our language is not capable in itself of being barren and sterile; but it should rather be attributed to the ignorance of our ancestors, who, having (as some one says, speaking of the ancient Romans) held good doing in greater estimation than good talking and preferred to leave to their posterity examples of virtue rather than precepts, have deprived themselves of the glory of their great deeds, and us of their imitation; and by the same means have left our tongue so poor and bare that it has need of ornament and (if we may be allowed the phrase) of borrowed plumage. [Footnote 17: From the "Défence et Illustration de la Langue Françoise." Translated for this collection by Eric Arthur Bell. Du Bellay belonged to a group of sixteenth-century writers known as the Pléiade, who took upon themselves the mission of reducing the French language, in its literary forms, to something comparable to Greek and Latin. Mr. Saintsbury says they "made modern French--made it, we may say, twice over"; by which he means that French, in their time, was revolutionized, and that, in the Romantic movement of 1830, Hugo and his associates were armed by the work of the Pléiade for their revolt against the restraints of rule and language that had been imposed by the eighteenth century.] But who is willing to admit that the Greek and Roman tongues have always possest that excellence which characterized them at the time of Homer, Demosthenes, Virgil, and Cicero? And if these authors were of the opinion that a little diligence and culture were incapable of producing greater fruit, why did they make such efforts to bring it to the pitch of perfection it is in to-day? I can say the same thing of our language, which is now beginning to bloom without bearing fruit, like a plant which has not yet flowered, waiting till it can produce all the fruit possible. This is certainly not the fault of nature who has rendered it more sterile than the others, but the fault of those who have tended it, and have not cultivated it sufficiently. Like a wild plant which grows in the desert, without ever being watered or pruned or protected by the trees and shrubs which give it shade, it fades and almost dies.