Hilaire Belloc

“ If in Charles of Orleans the first note of the French Renaissance is heard, if in Villon you find first its energy appearing above ground, yet both are forerunners only.
With Marot one is in the full tide of the movement. The discovery of America had preceded his birth by three or perhaps four years. His early manhood was filled with all that ferment, all that enormous branching out of human life, which was connected with the expansion of Spain ”

“ He was national in his power of sharp recovery from any emotion back into his normal balance.
He was national in that he depended upon companions, and stood for a crowd, and deplored all isolation. He was national in that he had nothing strenuous about him, and that he was amiable, and if he had heard of "earnest" men, he would have laughed at them a little, as people who did not see the whole of life.
He was especially national (and it is here that the poet returns) in that most national of all things--a complete sympathy with the atmosphere of the native tongue. ”

“ But when we see Marot, our first thought will certainly be, as I have said, that we have come across a Frenchman; and the more French for a touch of the commonplace.
See how French was the whole career!
Whatever is new attracts him. The reformation attracts him. It was chic to have to do with these new things. He had the French ignorance of what was foreign and alien; the French curiosity to meddle with it because it had come from abroad ”

“ Thus men debate a good deal upon the poetic value of Wordsworth, but it is certain, when one sees how bathed he is in the sense of English words, their harmony and balance, that the man is entirely English, that no other nation could have produced him, and that he will be most difficult for foreigners to understand. ”

“ He buys two bits of land, he talks of them continually, sees to them, visits them. They are quite little bits of land. He calls one Clément, and the other Marot! Here is a whimsicality you would not find, I think, among another people.
He has the hatred of "sprawling" in his particular art which is the chief aesthetic character of the French; but he has the tendency to excess in opinion or in general expression which is their chief political fault. ”