L'estude tenant l'oeil sur le livre abbaissé
Se sied un peu plus bas, l'Ame imaginative,
Les yeux levez au ciel, se tient contemplative
Debout devant ta face; et là dedans le rond
D'un grand miroir d'acier te fait voir jusqu'au fond
Tout ce qui est au ciel, sur la terre, et sous l'onde,
Et ce qui est caché sous la terre profonde;
Le grave Jugement dort dessus ton giron,
Et le Discours ailez volent a l'environ. (F. 501.)

Hail to thee, Deafness, boon and holy power,
Thou that hast scoop'd thee out an ample bower
Within a hard rock where thy throne is seen,
Hung round with tapestry of mossy green,
The stony tower, embattled, guards thy state,
And Nile's steep falls are thundering at the gate.
There Silence on thy right hand still doth sit,

His finger on his lips; and in a fit
Of tranced sorrow, Melancholy lost,
Upon thy left, like a for-pined ghost.
A little lower, Study bends his look
For ever glu'd upon his wide-spread book.
Before thee, rapt Imagination stands,

With brow to heaven uplifted, while her hands
Present to thee a mirror of broad steel,

That in its depth all wonders doth reveal,

Of sky, and air, and earth, and the wide ocean;
All things that are, whether in rest or motion.
Grave Judgment on thy lap, in sleep profound
Is laid; and winged words flit hovering round.

His advice to the young king, Francis the Second, on his accession to the crown, is remarkable for its freedom. The poets of those times seem to have kept firm hold on one of the most valuable privileges of their profession, and not to have sunk the monitor in the courtier. Of the poems which Spenser translated from Bellay, the following Sonnet is rendered with a fidelity that has not in the least injured its spirit. I have selected it as the best of those which he has taken.

Sur la croppe d'un mont je vis une fabrique

De cent brasses de haut: cent colonnes d'un rond,
Toutes de diamans ornoyent le brave front,
Et la facon de l'œuvre estoit à la Dorique,

La muraille n'estoit de marbre ni de brique,

Mais d'un luisant cristal, qui du sommet au fond,
Elançoit mile rais de son ventre profond,

Sur cent degrez dorez du plus fin or d'Afrique.
D'or estoit le lambris, et le sommet encor
Reluisoit escaillé de grandes lames d'or:
Le pavé fut de jaspe, et d'esmauraude fine.
O vanité du monde! un soudain tremblement
Faisant crouler du mont la plus basse racine,
Renverse ce beau lieu depuis le fondement.

(Edit. Rouen, 1597, fo. 391.)

On high hill's top I saw a stately frame,

An hundred cubits high by just assize, With hundred pillars fronting fair the same,

All wrought with diamond, after Dorick wise;

Nor brick nor marble was the wall to view,

But shining crystal, which from top to base
Out of her womb a thousand rayons threw,

One hundred steps of Afric gold's enchase:
Gold was the parget; and the ceiling bright
Did shine all scaly, with great plates of gold;
The floor of jasp and emerald was dight.

O! world's vainness! whiles thus I did behold,
An earthquake shook the hill from lowest seat,
And overthrew this frame with ruine great.

(The Visions of Bellay, 2.)

Joachim du Bellay, descended from one of the noblest families in Anjou, was born at Liré, a village eight miles from Angers, in the year 1524. The facility and sweetness with which he wrote, gained him the appellation of the French Ovid. He was highly esteemed by Margaret of Valois, Queen of Navarre, and by Henry the Second, who granted him a considerable pension. He passed some years in Italy, whither he went in the suite of his kinsman, Cardinal du Bellay. We have seen how ill he was pleased with that country, and yet how much he learned from it. Another of his family, Eustache du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, obtained for him in 1555, a canonry in his church. He was carried off at an early age by a fit of apoplexy, in January, 1560; and was buried in the church of Notre Dame.

Many epitaphs were made for him, in which he

F

was called Pater Elegantiarum; Pater Omnium

Leporum.

He wrote Latin Poems that are not so much esteemed as his French.

REMY BELLEAU.

THE Painter of Nature was the appellation which distinguished Remy Belleau among the poets of his time; and it is enough to obtain for him no ordinary share of regard from those who know how much is implied in that title, and how rare that merit is of which it may be considered as a pledge. I have not yet had the good fortune to meet with an edition containing the whole of his works. That which I have seen was printed during his life-time, with the following title: Les Amours et nouveaux Eschanges des Pierres precieuses; Vertus et Proprietez d'icelles. Discours de la Vanité, Pris de l'Ecclesiaste. Eclogues Sacrees, Prises du Cantique des Cantiques. Par Remy Belleau. A Paris par Mamert Patisson, au logis de Rob. Estienne, 1576, avec privilege du Roy. "The Loves and new Transformations of the Precious Stones; their Virtues and Properties. Discourse on Vanity, taken from Ecclesiastes. Sacred Eclogues, taken from the Song of Songs, &c." There is

in these sufficient to prove that Belleau was not in the habit of looking at nature through the eyes of other men; that he did not content himself with making copies of copies; but that he drew from the life, whenever he had such objects to describe as the visible world could supply him with. Nor is this the whole of his praise; for he has also some fancy, and a flow of numbers unusually melodious.

In the above collection, the first poem, on the Loves and Transformations of the Precious Stones, dedicated to Henry III., is on a plan not much more happy than that of Darwin's Loves of the Plants. Several of them are supposed to have been youths or maidens, who, in consequence of adventures similar to those invented by the poet of the Metamorphoses, were changed into their present shape. Thus, in the first of these tales, the nymph Amethyste, of whom Bacchus is enamoured, prays to Diana for succour, and by her is transformed into a stone, which the god dyes purple with the juice of the grape. A description, which he has here introduced of the jolly god with the Bacchantes in different attitudes about his chariot, is executed with a luxuriance of pencil that reminds one of Rubens.

D'un pié prompt et legier, ces folles Bassarides
Environnent le char, l'une se pend aux brides
Des onces mouchettez d'estoiles sur le dos,
Onces à l'oeil subtil, au pié souple et dispos,