LAY ORATORY 195 The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were, as is pretty well known, the time when the legal assemblies reached maturity, confirmed their organisation, became aware of their importance, and established the foundations of their power. The following coincidence which no doubt indicates their further influence is worthy of notice. The famous Bazochiens were at this period at the zenith of their prosperity and audacity. Just as their elders, those who sat in the law-courts, the magistrates, claimed to be a power in the State, allowed themselves to be called "Senate " and "Senators" in the literary speech, and assumed the right of co-operating in the legislative action of the King and his Council, so the Bazochiens, the young Government clerks, played the part of the modern press, contemporaneously with the Sots, and also assumed a certain right of administering advice. All this evolution and stir in the legal world was necessarily accompanied by a rapid development of judicial eloquence; and, as a matter of fact, judicial eloquence dates from that time. History has preserved the names of those Juvenal (or Jouvenel) des Ursins, who formed so illustrious a family. The father, Jean Juvenal des Ursins, provost of the traders of Paris, enjoying the full confidence of Charles VI., King's counsel, Chancellor of France, was considered the most eloquent man of his time. Guillaume Juvenal des Ursins, his son, councillor in the Parlement, Lieutenant-General of Dauphiny, bailiff or Sens, Chancellor of France, successively loved, hated, and imprisoned by Louis XI., and then once more taken into favour, had the same reputation as his father, and was tainly a great statesman and a brilliant orator. The brother of the latter, the second Jean Juvenal des Ursins, stands highest as the historian of Charles VI.'s reign. Another brother, Jacques, was archbishop and diplomatist. All these were celebrated for beauty of character and eloquence. The jurisconsults of this epoch of lawyers are famous also. Men like Philippe of Navarre, Jean d'Helin, Pierre de Fontaines and Philippe de Beaumanoir in the thirteenth century founded the School of French Jurisprudence, which was kept up and strengthened by Simon de Bussy, Bracq, Dauvet, Guillaume de Dormans, Arnaud de Corbie, Morvillers, Jean le Clerc, de Trainel, Jean de la Vaquerie. It is, perhaps, as Boulainvilliers says in his "Traité du Gouvernement de la France," to the eternal shame of the Parlement of Paris that on January 3, 1420, it condemned, under English pressure, to banishment for life and forfeiture of all rights "messire Charles de Valois, Dauphin of Viennois, and only son of the King, on account of the homicide done to the person of John, Duke of Burgundy." But it shows what importance the Parlement of Paris had attained in the State; and later on, in happier times, we read with emotion and respect that edict of Louis XII. which comes at the very end of the fifteenth century (1499), enacting that "the law shall always be followed, in despite of any orders contrary to the law which importunity may force from the King." This edict issued, no doubt, from the great heart and the great mind of Louis XII., but it is the result of that great legislative and juridical work of the law-makers who founded in France the reign of the law, constantly threatened, but ever persisting, from whose justice it is imprudent to flee. CHAPTER VII LEARNING THE zest for learning, which we noticed in the fourteenth century, is to be found in the fifteenth century also. What we might call a preparation for the Renaissance, or rather a continuous movement in the mind from whence the Renaissance will emerge-humanism in a word-is making itself felt. Translations multiply. Laurent de Premierfait gives a translation of the "Economics" of Aristotle, of " De Amicitia," of "De Senectute." We find belonging to that time anonymous translations of Vegetius, Sallust, Suetonius, and others. The Bible in French, St. Augustine's "City of God," translations by Raoul de Presles, which belong to the end of the preceding century, spread and multiply; soon they are to be printed, and then they will be even more widely distributed. Another form of learning, quite new and very important, which has gone on expanding and developing up to our time, is the translation and interpretation of modern foreign books. During the fifteenth century Italy alone supplied the material for this important work. But that, after all, was a beginning -Laurent de Premierfait, if he translated Aristotle and Cicero, also translated the "Decameron" of Boccaccio. Jean Lebègue gives a translation of the "First Punic War" by Leonardo Bruni, known in France under the name of Léonard Arétin (d'Arezzo), who must not be confused with Arétin, the satirist of the sixteenth century (Pietro Aretino), who was a serious historian and an official of the Republic of Florence. Anonymous translations of Petrarch are very numerous in France in the fifteenth century. It almost amounts to a law, in this eminently intellectual country, that when the national literature declines a little or grows feeble, the public mind is at once drawn eagerly towards foreign literature, whence the national literature immediately imbibes fresh strength. Hence even periods of decline become occasions for dreaming of a revival, and lead to a revival, in fact. If the sixteenth century in France had its preparation for a revival in the Italian literature, read and translated by the French, it had no less had its preparation since the fifteenth century in Latin literature. The last of the scholiasts still repeated the already antiquated proverb, "Bonus grammaticus, malus logicus" ("Good grammarian, bad logician"): but the grammarians, that is to say, the humanists, knew how to defend themselves, and even to conquer. It is no longer only "the Orleanists" who support and encourage the love of letters. In Paris the Faculty of Arts devotes itself energetically to the good fight. Its professors give a place in their curriculum to rhetoric and Latin verse. Guillaume Fichet, about 1470, learns to write and speak in correct Latin. He was already a Ciceronian. He it was who brought to Paris the first printers who followed their craft in France: Ulric Gering, Martin Krantz, and Michael Friburger, and published in printed form his "Rhetoricorum libri tres." His pupil, Robert Gaguin, a much-esteemed historian and diplomatist, continued his work. The College of Navarre, then at the height of its fame, with its celebrated Professors Tardif and Guillaume de Montjoie, from the middle of the fifteenth century encouraged admiration for fine, or rather for correct Latinity, quite as much, if not more than the Faculty of Arts. Certain unattached Italian professors in Paris gave lessons on the Latin language and style, and also on Latin versification, offering excellent illustrations of these from Petrarch, and occasionally from Bembo and Sadolet. The sixteenth century is on the way, and the room, swept and aired, is already prepared to receive it. CHAPTER VIII SUMMARY OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY THE fifteenth century, seen from afar, might well be regarded as a century of preparation. The most stupendous discoveries made by mankind during the whole of the historic period belong to this age. The New World was discovered in 1492, printing about 1450, engraving in 1423. If gunpowder, in the preceding century, changed political history, these inventions of the fifteenth century changed intellectual history. They elevated the human mind, they widened enormously the horizon, they made knowledge popular, plebeian, almost democratic; they called a larger number of men to intellectual pursuits; they prepared the way and went far to create in a brief space of time a new power, that of public opinion. A thinker certainly made quicker progress than of old, and was able, through the rapidity of his thought and an expansion of mind such as the world had never before witnessed, to stir humanity and successfully combat the erstwhile formidable forces of authority, dogma, and tradition. New instruments of thought had been created. This proves how strong thought was, with a strength which was to increase the powers of thought tenfold. But as often happens, the heir enjoyed the honour which the father had laboured to procure. If the sixteenth century was so great, it was by reason of its own worth in the first place, but also because of the marvellous tools handed on to it by the fifteenth century. It follows that the fifteenth century was one of the most important sources that history has known. At that time, not only were all the germs of the modern |