BARTAS, Guillaume de Salluste du, a French poet, was born in 1544, and died in 1590 of wounds received in the battle of Ivry. He was employed by Henry IV. of France in England, Denmark, and Scotland; and he commanded a troop of horse in Gascony, under the Marshal de Martingan. His principal work, La Sepmaine, a poem on the creation of the world, which has long since fallen into oblivion, once enjoyed a high reputation, thirty editions of it having been printed within six years after its appearance. Its religious tone and rather fanciful style made it a great favourite with English writers of the time, by whom the author was always designated as the divine Du Bartas, and placed on an equality with Ariosto. Spenser, Hall, and Ben Jonson, all speak in the highest terms of what seems to us a most uninteresting poem. King James VI. tried his “prentice hand” at the translation of Du Bartas’s poem L' Uranie, and the compliment was returned by the French writer translating, as La Lepanthe, the monarch’s poem on the battle of Lepanto. Joshua Sylvester, one of the Spenserian poets, translated the Sepmaine in 1598, and the work in its English form was extremely popular and exercised no slight influence on English literature. Du Bartas published a second Week in 1584; portions of it and of the first were translated by Th. Hudson, William Lisle, and Thomas Winter.