There remains the “Joachim du Bellay,” a slight essay where Pater occupies himself with showing how Ronsard endeavoured to draw the influence of the Italian renaissance in to enliven and deepen the native Gothic material of French song, “gilding its surface with a strange delightful foreign aspect, like a chance effect of light.” He indicates how, in that transformation, the old French seriousness disappeared, leaving nothing but “the elegance, the aerial touch, the perfect manner” in the poets of Ronsard’s school, of whom Du Bellay was the last. Du Bellay strove with all his might, as in the little tract, _La Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse_, “to adjust the existing French culture to the rediscovered classical culture,” “to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number, perfection.” Pater traces the eagerness for word-music, the beginnings of _poésie intime_, the poetry in which a writer strives to shape his innermost moods or to take the world into his confidence. He illustrates Du Bellay’s fondness for landscape: “a sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door: a moment—and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.” The whole essay is in a lighter, a less serious tone, and dwells more softly upon the surface of things; and thus gives a kind of relief, a breathing space in the intense mood. One feels that some art went to the careful placing of these essays; for we pass to the study on “Winckelmann,” of which we have spoken at length, in which Pater found a type by which he might reveal his own inner thought, the conversion which he had experienced. And thus we come to the “Conclusion,” a most elaborate texture of writing, made obscure by its compression, by its effort to catch and render the most complicated effects of thought. This “Conclusion” was omitted in the second edition of the book. Pater says that he excluded it, “as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” He adds that he made a few changes which brought it closer to his original meaning, and that he had dealt more fully with the subject in _Marius the Epicurean_. The only substantial alterations in the essay are as follows. Pater originally wrote:— “High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the ‘enthusiasm of humanity.’” This sentence became:— “Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us.”