longed for authority and power, and prayed for a strong man, she became an empress : "Dame des cieux, régente terrienne, Empérière des infernaulx palux." Or again, to quote the same author, we see in these poets "the characteristic side of the fifteenth century, the perturbation of moral sense, doubt on every side, a blinding of all consciences, hesitation among the most learned, mutability among the most deeply convinced, and confusion of the sincere conscience which sees everywhere nothing but fluctuating ideas, things corrupt, shameful, and disgraced." And, lastly, the study of these writers is interesting and useful for this reason, that they represent the beginning of a new and the end of an old order. The Mahometan, expelled at one end of Europe, entered at another; a great kingdom rose in the west, and one fell in the east. Printing and the revival of Greek learning caused a revolution in scholarship; to east and west, across the ocean which till now had been the bounding river of the world, were opened out new lands, new fields of enterprise, new sources of wealth. Language became fixed, and the folk learned to find wisdom as well as amusement in books: and in the newly-printed works of Roman literature, students discovered how thought and language may be wedded, and of what mighty and deep things words are capable. It was not for threescore years and more that the dazzled minds of men could comprehend the splendour of the new order, nor was it till the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century that Shakespeare and Spenser and Jonson; Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Montaigne, Malherbe, spoke; that Drake, Pizarro, Cortes did mighty deeds; that Galileo, Descartes, and Tycho Brahe thought. Men at first, like children suddenly rushing from the dark school-room to the bright sunshine, could do nothing but dance about and shout. Let this be a sufficient apology. My poets are all born before the sixteenth century, and are all tinged with some of the old spirit, except, perhaps, Mellin de Saint Gelais. They begin with Froissart, and end with Clément Marot. Of the great mass of verse writers who were contemporaneous with or followed immediately after Clément, I have not spoken. One or two of them deserve honour; most of them belong to the tribe of imitators. With regard to the editions of the poets of whom I have undertaken to give an account, most of them have been reprinted, or printed for the first time, within the last fifty years. But there are a few-Christine de Pisan and Alain Chartier, for instance-who have never been printed or are inaccessible, and a mass of others, the great tribe of Molinet and Company, whose reputation is gone, and their works lost or only found in curious collections. With these I have been, perforce, content to get what selections I could, and to rely for the rest on the judgment of others. The descriptions of the allegorists, for instance, I owe almost wholly to Goujet's old book on French Literature. Michault and Martial de Paris have not, so far as I know, been reprinted of late years, the latest editions I have seen of them being upwards of a hundred years old. The rest are found in the Bibliothéque Elzevérienne, or are published singly by Messrs. P. L. Jacob, Ch. D'Hericault, Tarbé, etc. A few things remain to be noted. The University of Paris, to which so many of my poets belonged, was in its constitution something like what Oxford and Cambridge are now. It had its own rights, governors, privileges, and laws. It was independent of the town, it had colleges, scholarships, rectors, and lecturers; it formed a small nation of itself. Many of its students were horribly poor, like Villon, and seem to have got their living anyhow, from patrons, by begging, or by stealing. As for their course of studies, it was very limited. Latin was the only language they knew anything about, and theology the only study in which any interest was taken. Though the trivium and the quadrivium were still in vogue at the end of the fifteenth century, the University of Paris was at the head of European education. It numbered 25000 scholars, and 5000 graduates. The Basoche properly means the commonalty of the clerks of parliament and lawyers, who had a kind of jurisdiction between themselves. The Basochiens, envious of the success of the confrères de la Passion in their mysteries, formed a sort of dramatic company, and acted allegorical dramas. From them sprang another society called Les Enfants de Sans Souci. They discarded the gravity of allegory, and played what they called soties. These were a mixture of the old 'morality' and the modern farce, with a strong infusion of satire. Clément Marot is said to have belonged to this troop before becoming page to Monsieur de Neuville. Constant allusions are made in the literature of the time to these dramatic companies. As for the form of our poetry, it consists of ballads, chansons, rondeaux, tençons, lays, virelays, triolets, sirventes, dicts, and complaintes. The ballad differed from the chanson only in having its refrain at the end of each verse. The rondeau generally consists of fifteen lines with only two rhymes; the first words of the first line are repeated in the ninth and the last line. The best specimens of this laboured and artificial form are certainly Clément Marot's. Examples of the rondeau will be found in the following pages. The tençons were questions and answers on matters relating to the science of love, and were greatly in vogue at the time of the Cours d' Amour, 'les plaids et gieux sous l'orme.' The triolet was another common form. This pretty little poem consisted of eight verses with two rhymes. The first two verses are repeated at the end to form a sort of refrain, and sometimes in the middle, for example: "Le premier jour du mois de Mai Fut le plus heureux de ma vie. Fut le plus heureux de ma vie." Sirventes were generally gallant or satirical pieces with a kind of invocation: reverdies were little songs of spring time and love chansons, lais, virelais, were different forms of songs, some with a refrain, and some without. The laws of these were altered from time to time. My aim is to form an introduction to French poetry; to shew by what means, and through what varying standards of taste the language of poetry came down to Boileau. With this object I have abstained from treating on the Langue d' Oil and the earlier versifiers, save in the brief examples given above; and I have considered that the best means of attaining my purpose was to take the poets singly -they have, as a rule, little connection with each otherand discuss their works and their genius. I begin with Jean Froissart, in whom many of the older forms and idioms are dropping out, and who is certainly the first that can be considered as having written in modern French-I include all the poets of the fifteenth century, and one or two of the early part of the sixteenth. And I conclude with Clément Marot, because, "on retrouve en lui la couleur de Villon, la gentillesse de Froissart, la delicatesse de Charles d'Orleans, le bon sens d'Alain Chartier, et la verve mordante de Jean de Meung." He sums up the middle ages; he heralds the new style; he is the last of the old poets in thought, and the first of the new in language. With regard to the language of the fifteenth century, I do not think it necessary or desirable to enter into any detailed account of its peculiarities. Should I find time and opportunity, I propose a separate Treatise on the History and Formation of the Langue d'Oil. I hope there will be no difficulty in understanding the extracts which I have given; with a view to facilitate the reading, I have given brief foot notes. Words occur which have been lost, such as het-hilaritas; aie-aide; antan―ante annum; sade, sadinet-agreeable; mie-mica. Words are spelt differently, apuys is appui; poy is peu; karesme is |