DELILLE, JACQUES, was born at Aigues-Perse, in Auvergne, June 22, 1733, and educated at Paris at the College de Lisieux. Poverty compelled him to accept the office of subordinate teacher at the College de Beauvais; but he was soon raised to the rank of professor of humanity in the college of Amiens. While holding this office he commenced a translation of Virgil's Georgics. On his return to Paris he was appointed professor at the College de la Marche. He now began to be known as a poet, and several of his pieces attained celebrity, particularly an epistle to M. Laurent. But it was the pub lication of his Georgics, a work to which he was urged by Racine, that raised him to distinction. The public read this translation with enthusiasm, and thought that the French language was capable of representing all the beauties of antiquity. Envy notwithstanding appeared here and there; and old forgotten poets were dragged from oblivion, that their works might be lauded at the expense of M. Delillo's reputation. In 1774 the author was elected a member of the Academy, and soon after published his celebrated poem, Lee Jardine.' The popularity of this work does not seem to have been equal to that of the Georgics.
Delille accompanied M. de Choiseul Gouffier on his embassy to Constantinople, and took the opportunity of visiting Athens. It was on this tour that he composed his poem, L'Imagination: On his return to Paris he became professor of Belles-lettres at the university and of Latin poetry at the College de France. By the Comte d'Artois he had been presented with the abbacy of A. S6verin, and thus placed in affluent circumstances. lie was unfortunate enough to lose all his property by the Revolution. At the celebration of the Fete de l'Etre Supreme, which took place during the Reign of Terror, Robespierre demanded of Delille an ode for the occasion. The poet, finding refusal was of no use, astonished Robespierre by writing a dithyrambic poem on the immortality of the soul, wherein he warmly supported that doctrine. The troubles of the capital induced him, in
1794, to leave Paris for St. Diez, and subsequently to retire to Switzerland, where the government of Berne mado him a citizen. Here he finished his Homme des Champs' and 'Los Trois Regnes de la Nature.' He afterwards visited London, where he translated Milton's ' Paradise Lost.' In 1801 he returned to Paris, was treated with marked attention by Bonaparte, but he declined to reenter the great world, and lived in modest retirement at the College of France. The last two years of his life were spent at Nanterre. He died at Paris, universally regretted, on the 1st of May 1813.
Delillo is one of those poets who will always be honoured by „ posterity ; he is regarded as a reformer of the language ; and he wrote verse with an ease and elegance before unknown. Those who feel pleasure in hearing the Alexandrine verse must be pleased (as far as structure goes) with the didactic poems of Heinle. Nothing can be conceived more smooth and easy than the flowing of his lines; and even when be writes in a measure more irregular, as in 'La Con versation,' the same correctness is so carefully attended to, that a person of the slightest ear may read him aloud without once hesitating as to the place where the caesura lies. To say he was a poet of great imagination would be going too far; but ho is entitled to higher praise than that of a mere veree-maker. His images, as well as his lines, are often exceedingly elegant. His 'Conversation' is an amusing poem ; it is a Theophra.stus in verse, portraying the different sorts of persons who figure in conversation. It has however the fault of most works that treat of characteristics—the persons who appear in it are personified abstractions, instead of iudividuals as they appear in nature.