difficult and concise writer. (People may say what they like, and I understand nothing of Greek, but everywhere in his translation the sense is so clear and so well put together that it is certain he has either accurately translated the author or by long study has absorbed such a vivid idea of Plutarch's general point of view that he has added nothing to him that falsifies the true Plutarch or gives a wrong impression of him). But I am above all grateful to him for having chosen so great a book and one so suitable to present to his country. We ignorant men had been in a sad plight if this book had not been dragged out of the quagmire for us; thanks to him, we dare at this moment speak and write; the ladies, because of it, domineer over the schoolmasters; it is in truth our breviary. If this worthy man were still alive, I would hand him over Xenophon to do the same with, for it would be an easier and more suitable occupation for his old age; and I cannot account for it, but it always seems to me (although he extricates himself very quickly and cleverly from a difficult passage) that his style is more his own when he is not in a hurry and can go along at his ease."

Side by side with the great printer-editors, scholars, and translators, literary history must record the names of some of the illustrious professors of the sixteenth century. Public education was veritably regenerated during that period by the regular teaching of Greek, and the foundation of the Collège de France. Reference has been made to the timid attempts to teach Greek in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century Greek became a fashion and a passion. "As soon as I get any money," wrote Erasmus the scholar, "I shall buy Greek books—and then I shall buy some clothes." Greek, at first taught by a few obscure Greeks or Italians, was welcomed and richly endowed at the Collège des Trois Langues, named afterwards Collège royal, and finally Collège de France. This splendid institution, which for more than a century was to represent the change in education, and thus complete the Sorbonne, was the idea of Guillaume Bude, a very great Hellenist, the pupil of Hermonymus of Sparta and Jean Lascaris. A very learned man, and the author of works on

This is so true and so exact that it is quite conceivable that Montaigne compared the translation with the text, and that it is a mere piece of affectation-one of his failings-when he says he knows nothing of Greek.

* The same remark applies here.

Roman coins ("De Asse"), "Commentaires sur la langue grecque," "Annotations sur les pandectes," &c., Bude obtained from Francis I., with the assistance of Jean du Bellay, permission to endow three professorial chairs, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and this was the nucleus of the Collège de France. Among those who taught there were Vatable (Wastebled), professor of Hebrew, editor of the famous Bible with commentaries known as "Vatable's Bible," and condemned by the Sorbonne for being infected with Calvinism; Danès, the pupil of Lascaris and Bude, professor of Greek, the teacher of Amyot, Brisson, and Daurat, who in his turn was the teacher of Ronsard; Toussain, also a pupil of Bude, professor of Greek, the teacher of Turnèbe, Frederic Morel, and the second Henri Estienne ; Lambin, the minute and laborious commentator, whose failings have continued to bear his name, and who edited Horace, Lucretius, Cicero, &c. ; lastly the illustrious Turnèbe.

Turnèbe, who called himself Tourneboeuf, signed his name as "Turnebius," and ended by being called Turnèbe, taught at first at Toulouse, and was afterwards professor of Greek language and Greek philosophy at the Collège de France. He enjoyed an immense reputation as a commentator, a professor, a philosopher, and a benevolent, upright, modest, and kindly man. Montaigne, Pasquier, L'Hospital, and Scaliger speak of him in terms of praise, which are at the same time protestations of friendship. He ruled as the kindly king of knowledge from 1547, the date of his nomination to the Collège de France, to 1565, the date of his death. He wrote commentaries upon Cicero, Varron, Horace, translated Plutarch, Theophrastus, Philo, Oppian, &c., and edited Sophocles, Synesius, &c.

The professors of the Collège de France played a very great part in the Renaissance of letters. They gave to French literature the taste for Greek: they were true humanists. Daurat, we know, was the pupil of Danès and the teacher of Ronsard, and thus it may truly be said that the Pléiade of 1550 owed its origin to the Estiennes and to the Collège de France.

CHAPTER VIII

POETS FROM 1500-1530

We must go back a little and inquire concerning the progress of poetry from the beginning of the sixteenth century. We know what was the condition of poetry at the end of the previous century; it had had its Charles d'Orléans and Villon, but very soon it had degenerated into a mere childish exercise of versification, rigorously subjected to complicated rules, still more childish. It was the period of the Chambres de rhétoriques and of the rhétoriqueurs. The latter were rather masters of versification than poets. Certain schools of the nineteenth century singularly resembled them in this respect. To such poetry was a game of precision and patience, and consisted in fitting words into a precise and complicated frame, which became increasingly precise and complicated. These were the men who edited between about 1450 and 1520 those innumerable treatises on versification, so detailed and, in our opinion, so useless. In these works all the narrow rules for poems of a definite form, such as ballades, virelais, rondeaux, &c., are patiently stated; much information, with examples, is also given concerning vers rapportés, i.e., lines so exactly symmetrical that the first, second, third, and fourth words of the second line correspond as complement or attribute, to the first, second, third, and fourth words of the first. There we learn of the due subordination of rhymes one to another, from simple assonance, which is to be disparaged, to rhyme, which was so rich that it was a ridiculous play of words, but which, at this period, under the name rime equivoquée or equivoque, was held in the highest esteem. These

treatises, all of which repeat themselves from the "Jardin de Plaisance," of which we have already spoken, and "L'Instructif de Seconde Rhétorique" (in verse) by an unknown author who gave himself the name of "Infortunatus" (1500), to Fabri (1521), and even to Antoine de Saix (1532) and Gratien du Pont (1539), enter into details which are very often trifling, but some of which are interesting enough as literary curiosities. Thus Gratien du Pont tells us that the Alexandrine verse was so named because it was invented by King Alexander !

"Les vers alexandrins, ce sont, noble lecteur,
Comme sont faits ceux-ci; je n'en suis inventeur,
Ni controuveur premier, ains le roi Alexandre,
Qui le premier en fut, comme l'on dit, facteur."

There we learn how expletives (chevilles) were classified in the sixteenth century; they were termed " petas or "caypetas," according as they were mild or violent. "Certainement," " vraiment at the end of a line, a venial fault, was petas"; but in—

a

"Je m'en vais acheter de l'orge,
Je vous le jure par saint George,"

we have a "cay-petas." The "cay-petas was greatly in vogue in all French poetry, and was a detestable thing.

The question on which metricians differed most at this epoch was that of the feminine ending; and this is really interesting. It is the great question of the e mute which is always recurring. Is the e mute to count? If it does, it must be pronounced and considered as a separate syllable. In that case the following line must be read with a stress on the e mute at the pause :

"Je vous rends bien grâce | je vous sais gré très fort."

If it does not count, it must not be pronounced at all, and must therefore be entirely disregarded:

"Je vous rends bonne grâc(e) | je vous sais gré très fort."

MANUALS ON METRE

259

Fabri holds the first opinion, in accordance, as we know, with the views of the earlier poets prior to 1500: "I combat the opinion of the new school, which maintains that there must be a vowel after the feminine ending for the sake of elision: none of the earlier poets did this."

Gratien du Pont holds the second view: "If the pause (of the hemistich) comes after a feminine ending, there must be a syllable more, and then the pause (in a line of ten syllables) will be after the fifth syllable reckoned as the fourth."

Thus we get

"Je vous rends bonne grâce | je vous sais gré très fort,"

or in a decasyllabic line—

"Je vous rends grâce | je vous sais gré très fort."

And he continues to discuss this point with great precision : either a pause is made at the hemistich or it is not. If there is not a pause the e is within the hemistich and must count; if there is a pause the e may be regarded just as if it were at the end of a line, where it does not count. But the pause is made at the end of the hemistich, and therefore the e mute must not be counted.

An intermediary solution was arrived at: writers thought to count the e mute without really doing so; they simply evaded it. It became the custom whenever there was an e mute at the pause to place after it a word beginning with a vowel which absorbed this e; this was called elision or synalepha. Such a solution of the difficulty had been discovered before Fabri and Gratien du Pont, by Crétin and Le Maire de Belges, and Clement Marot. It was to combat these views that Fabri and Gratien du Pont took up their pens. Fabri treated this novel proceeding, for which there was but slight authority, as follows:-

"We understand that the source of this new method is to be found in the late Master Jean de Belges and a certain Crétin, who had been a pupil of the aforesaid De Belges [it was the exact opposite ;