Delille

Delille, JACQUES, a writer extravagantly overrated in his lifetime, was born near Aigues-Perse in Auvergne, on June 22, 1738. He was an illegitimate child, and was brought up by charity. Educated at the Collège de Lisieux in Paris, he distinguished himself as a scholar, and obtained a professorship in Amiens. His verse translation of the Georgics, published in 1769, had an extraordinary vogue, and was extolled far beyond its merits by Voltaire and other critics. Its author was made an academician in 1774, and, after holding a canonry at Moissac, was presented by the Comte d'Artois with the abbacy of Saint-Severin, the income of which amounted to 30,000 livres a year. Les Jardins, a didactic poem which Delille published in 1782, found a vast body of readers, and was generally accepted as a masterpiece. The outbreak of the Revolution compelling Delille to leave France, he travelled in Switzerland and Germany, and then removed to London, where he occupied himself for eighteen months in translating the Paradise Lost. After his return to France in 1802, he produced a translation of the Æneid (1804) and several didactic and descriptive works in verse—L'Imagination (1806), Les Trois Rêges (1809), and La Conversation (1812). He became blind in his old age, and died on May 1, 1813. During his life he was not only regarded by his countrymen as the greatest French poet of the day, but was even declared to be the equal of Virgil and Homer. His fame, however, suffered a rapid eclipse, and his lack of poetic genius is now generally admitted. He was merely a fluent versifier, whose knack of turning out ingenious paraphrases exactly suited the taste of his contemporaries. See Sainte-Beuve's Portraits Littéraires, vol. ii.