necessity of prudence in these
borrowings, and both repudiated the charge of wishing to latinize their
mother tongue. The book was a spirited defence of poetry and of the
possibilities of the French language; it was also a declaration of war
on those writers who held less heroic views.

The violent attacks made by du Bellay on Marot and his followers, and on
Sibilet, did not go unanswered. Sibilet replied in the preface to his
translation (1549) of the _Iphigenia_ of Euripides; Guillaume des
Autels, a Lyonnese poet, reproached du Bellay with ingratitude to his
predecessors, and showed the weakness of his argument for imitation as
opposed to translation in a digression in his _Replique aux furieuses
defenses de Louis Meigret_ (Lyons, 1550); Barthelemy Aneau, regent of
the College de la Trinite at Lyons, attacked him in his _Quintil
Horatian_ (Lyons, 1551), the authorship of which was commonly attributed
to Charles Fontaine. Aneau pointed out the obvious inconsistency of
inculcating imitation of the ancients and depreciating native poets in a
work professing to be a defence of the French language. Du Bellay
replied to his various assailants in a preface to the second edition
(1550) of his sonnet sequence _Olive_, with which he also published two
polemical poems, the _Musagnaeomachie_, and an ode addressed to Ronsard,
_Contre les envieux poetes_. _Olive_, a collection of love-sonnets
written in close imitation of Petrarch, first appeared in 1549. With it
were printed thirteen odes entitled _Vers lyriques_. Olive has been
supposed to be an anagram for the name of a Mlle Viole, but there is
little evidence of real passion in the poems, and they may perhaps be
regarded as a Petrarcan exercise, especially as, in the second edition,
the dedication to his lady is exchanged for one to Marguerite de Valois,
sister of Henry II. Du Bellay did not actually introduce the sonnet into
French poetry, but he acclimatized it; and when the fashion of
sonneteering became a mania he was one of the first to ridicule its
excesses.

About this time du Bellay had a serious illness of two years' duration,
from which dates the beginning of his deafness. He had further anxieties
in the guardianship of his nephew. The boy died in 1553, and Joachim,
who had up to this time borne the title of sieur de Lire, became
seigneur of Gonnor. In 1549 he had published a _Recueil de poesies_
dedicated to the Princess Marguerite. This was followed in 1552 by a
v