... 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.