Dont nul ne revient vers nous.
Or of the cat who was--
... par aventure
Le plus bel oeuvre que nature
Fit onc en matière de chats.
All that delicate side of him we understand very well.
Nor is it to modern Englishmen alone that he will appeal. He powerfully affected, it may be presumed, the English Renaissance which succeeded him. Spenser--thirty years after his death--was moved to the translation of his famous lament for Rome, and no one can read the sonnets to which he gave their final form without catching the same note in the great English cycle of the generation after him--the close of the sixteenth and the opening of the seventeenth centuries.
But his verse read will prove all this and suggest much more.
EXTRACTS FROM THE "ANTIQUITEZ DE ROME."
Of the high series which Rome called forth from Du Bellay during that bitter diplomatic exile of his, I have chosen these three sonnets, because they seem best to express the majesty and gloom which haunted him. It is difficult to choose in a chain of cadences so equal and so exalted, but perhaps the last, "Telle que dans son char la Berecynthienne" is the most marvellous. The vision alone of Rome like the mother of the Gods in her car would have made the sonnet immortal. He adds to the mere picture a noise of words that is like thunder in the hills far off on summer afternoons: the words roll and crest themselves and follow rumbling to the end: he could not have known as he wrote it how great a thing he was writing. It has all the character of verse that increases with time and seems superior to its own author's intention.