The followers of “a prince” are inevitably eclipsed by their leader, and that is the more likely to be the case when a body of poets are memorable for their accomplishment, their general poetic spirit, their scholarship--for anything, in short, rather than for power. Power, indeed, is not what can be attributed to the poets of the Pléiade. When it appears among the younger men it is in the verse of the Huguenots Du Bartas and D’Aubigné, in whom there is again less scholarly accomplishment. Among the other poets of Ronsard’s school, from his brother in literature Joachim du Bellay down to his last follower Jean Bertaut (1532-1611), the best is commonly what is melancholy or what is gay and graceful. Joachim du Bellay[91] published his first volume, which contained the Sonnets to Olive, the _Musagnæomachie_, or “Battle between the Muses and Ignorance,” and some Odes in 1550, a little before Ronsard. The sonnet had already been written in French by Mellin de Saint-Gelais, but Du Bellay claimed, and was allowed, the honour of having first “acclimatised” it. The model adopted and constantly followed in France was the Petrarchan. His most memorable work was born of his new experiences in Italy. It was there that he wrote the _Antiquités de Rome_--the sonnets translated by Spenser under the name of _The Ruins_--his _Regrets_, in which he gives expression to his disgust at the papal capital and his home-sickness, and his _Jeux Rustiques_, inspired by the Latin poetry of Navagiero, the Venetian who advised Boscan to write in the Italian manner. Du Bellay himself wrote Latin verse. The _Jeux Rustiques_, published at the same time as the _Regrets_, 1558, contain his best known pieces, the perfectly gay and graceful _Vanneur_ (“the Winnower”), and the lines to Venus, in which he has done all there was to be done with that very artificial product the pastoral poetry of learned poets. Withal Du Bellay carried beak and claws. He was praised for having put the epigram into the sonnet, and there are certainly few better examples how that can be achieved than in the numbers of the _Regrets_ which contrast the outward courtesy and dignity with the inward treason and meanness of the Roman court. Du Bellay is more uniformly excellent than Ronsard, but the bulk of his work is far smaller and he tried less. [SN: _Remi Belleau._]