Note 17 — WHY OLD FRENCH WAS NOT AS RICH AS GREEK AND LATIN[17]

From the "Défence et Illustration de la Langue Françoise." Translated for this collection by Eric Arthur Bell. Du Bellay belonged to a group of sixteenth-century writers known as the Pléiade, who took upon themselves the mission of reducing the French language, in its literary forms, to something comparable to Greek and Latin. Mr. Saintsbury says they "made modern French—made it, we may say, twice over"; by which he means that French, in their time, was revolutionized, and that, in the Romantic movement of 1830, Hugo and his associates were armed by the work of the Pléiade for their revolt against the restraints of rule and language that had been imposed by the eighteenth century.