JACQUES

DELILLE (1738–1813)  , French poet, was born on the 22nd of June 1738 at Aigue-Perse in Auvergne . He was an illegitimate child, and was descended by his mother from the chancellor De 1'HSpital . He was educated at the college of Lisieux in Paris and became an elementary teacher . He gradually acquired a reputation as a poet by his epistles, in which things are not called by their ordinary names but are hinted at by elaborate periphrases . Sugar becomes " le miel americain que du suc des roseaux exprima 1'Africain." The publication (1769) of his translation of the Georgics of Virgil made him famous . Voltaire recommended the poet for the next vacant place in the Academy . He was at once elected a member, bait was not admitted until 1774 owing to the opposition of the king, who alleged that he was too young . In his Jardins, ou fart d'embellir les paysages (1782) he made good his pretensions as an original poet . In 1786 he made a journey to Constantinople in the train of the ambassador M. de Choiseul-Gouffier . Delille had become professor of Latin poetry at the College de France, and abbot of Saint-Severin, when the outbreak of the Revolution reduced him to poverty . He purchased his personal safety by professing his adherence to revolutionary doctrine, but eventually quitted Paris, and retired to St Die, where he completed his translation of the Aeneid . He emigrated first to Basel and then to Glairesse in Switzerland .

Here he finished his Homme des champs, and his poem on the Trois regnes de la nature . His next place of

refuge was in Germany, where he composed his La Pitie; and finally, he passed some time in London, chiefly employed in translating Paradise Lost . In 1802 he was able to return to Paris, where, although nearly blind, he resumed his professorship and his chair at the Academy, but lived in retirement . He fortunately did not outlive the vogue of the descriptive poems which were his special province, and died on the 1st of May 1813 . Delille left behind him little prose . His preface to the translation of the Georgics is an able essay, and contains many excellent hints on the art and difficulties of translation . He wrote the article " La Bruyere " in the Biographic universelle . The following is the list of his poetical works:—Les Georgiques de Virgile, traduites en vers franYais (Paris, 1769, 1782, 1785, 1809); Les Jardins, en quatre chants (1780; new edition, Paris, 18oi); L'Homme des champs, ou les Georgiques francaises (Strassburg, 1802); Poesies fugitives (1802); Dithyrambe sur l'immortalite de l'&me, suivi du passage du Saint Gothard, poeme traduit de l'Apglais de Madame la duchesse de Devonshire (1802); La Pitie, poeme en quatre chants (Paris, 1802); L'Eneide de Virgile, traduite en vers francais (4 vols., 1804) ; Le Paradis perdu (3 vols., 1804); L'Imagirtation, poeme en huit chants (2 vols., 18o6); Les trois regnes de la nature (2 vols., 18o8); La Conversation (1812) . A collection given under the title of Poesies diverses (18o1) was disavowed by Delille . His Euvres (16 vols.) were published in 1824 . See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits ;itteraires, vol. ii .