ame affections which
you experience in reading those authors in the original."

In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give it grace, number,
perfection, and as painters do to their pictures, that last, so
desirable, touch--cette derniere main que nous desirons--what Du Bellay
is pleading for is his mother-tongue, the language, that is, in which
one will have the utmost degree of what is moving and passionate. He
recognised of what force the music and dignity of languages are, how
they enter into the inmost part of things; and in pleading for the
cultivation of the French language, he is pleading for no merely
scholastic interest, but for freedom, impulse, reality, not in
literature merely, but in daily communion of speech. After all, it was
impossible to have this impulse in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut
up in books as in reliquaries--peris et mises en reliquaires de livres.
By aid of this starveling stock--pauvre plante et vergette--of the
French language, he must speak delicately, movingly, if he is ever to
speak so at all: that, or none, must be for him the medium of what he
calls, in one of his great phrases, le discours fatal des choses
mondaines--that discourse about affairs which decides men's fates. And
it is his patriotism not to despair of it; he sees it already perfect in
all elegance and beauty of words--parfait en toute elegance et venuste
de paroles.

Du Bellay was born in the disastrous year 1525, the year of the battle
of Pavia, and the captivity of Francis the First. . His parents died
early, and to him, as the younger son, his mother's little estate, ce
petit Lire, the beloved place of his birth, descended. He was brought up
by a brother only a little older than himself; and left to themselves,
the two boys passed their lives in day-dreams of military glory. Their
education was neglected; "The time of my youth," says Du Bellay, "was
lost, like the flower which no shower waters, and no hand cultivates."
He was just twenty years old when the elder brother died, leaving
Joachim to be the guardian of his child. It was with regret, with a
shrinking feeling of incapacity, that he took upon him the burden of
this responsibility. Hitherto he had looked forward to the profession of
a soldier, hereditary in his family. But at this time a sickness
attacked him which brought him cruel sufferings, and seemed likely to be
mortal. It was then for the first time that he read the Greek and Latin
po