hearted hospitality of Marguerite (1492-1549) had gathered at her court were developing by the introduction of tragic sympathy and artistic finish the traditions of the prose fabliaux so well inaugurated in the "Cent nouvelles nouvelles." The year 1558 was made memorable by the publication of the "Heptameron " which sprang from the immediate circle of that royal lady, and by the "Joyeux devis" of des Périers, the only frank sceptic of his time, whose "Cymbalum mundi" earned him a persecution that drove him at last to suicide (1544). His work hardly marks an advance, except in style, on de la Salle. The anecdotes are short, crisp, witty, but with no trace of growing refinement or culture. The seventy-two tales of the "Heptameron ", on the other hand, are epoch-making in the æsthetics of prose fiction, because they join to the joy of life that pulses with healthy vigor through all the early pagan renaissance, a refinement of manners and morals and a grace of conception that belongs rather to the humanists, and a delicacy of observation and description that is peculiarly its own.

Meantime the traditions of Rabelais were continued in the latter half of the century by the "Apologie pour Hérodote" of the scholarly Henri Estienne,' a very amusing attack on the clergy of the time that did much to aid in fixing the classical language of the next century. Then, as a belated fruit of this epoch, there appeared in 1610 Beroald de Verville's "Moyen de parvenir ", a curious mixture of wit, learning, and vulgarity, with a plenteous store of anecdotes that might have furnished him with another "Cent nouvelles" if he had not preferred to strew them in the freakish dialogue of his mad fratrasie. Between him and des Périers both in style and time, is the Abbé de Brantôme (15401614), ostensibly a writer of contemporary biography, but

1 Nicholas de Troyes and Noel de Fail are still earlier imitators of de la Salle, but intrinsically of less importance.

* Otherwise known as Henry Stephens from his association with the English reformers in 1550. He was the most illustrious of a famous family of French scholars and printers. See Encyc. Brit. xxii. 534 sqq.

really a laughing collector of piquant and scandalous stories of the dames de par le monde, told with great gusto and considerable power of character painting, so that his works are reprinted and still read.

Prose satire first at this period became an important political weapon in the " Menippée ", that several liberal and patriotic Catholics directed against the League and its desperate defense of Paris in 1593, while in his “ Essays Montaigne had already created a new type of prose writing that has gained little at the hands of his successors, for the inventor of the essay is still the most popular essayist.

The exuberant hopes of the pagan renaissance, as they appeared in the joyous nature worship of Rabelais, had not been fulfilled, and to that period of generous expansion there had succeeded a reaction to easy egoism and unaggressive scepticism. This is the temper in which Montaigne chooses the devices "How do I know?" and "What does it matter?" He had been a boy of scholarly and sedentary tastes and carefully trained in the classics. His manhood, though uneventful, was such as to bring him in contact with all phases of life, and his ripe experience has as its fruit the "Essays ", of which two books appeared in 1580, and the more important third book in 1588. No French work has exercised so great and lasting an influence on the writing and thought of the world. Montaigne here inaugurates the literature of the public confessional, of loquacious egotism. His "Essays" are indeed, as he says, "a book of good faith" He takes us into his confidence and rambles on in delicious, and not unmethodical, desultoriness. The essays sprang no doubt from such note books as scholarly men used to keep in that age, and gradually rounded themselves into their present form from a few connected thoughts. In the last series, however, there is far more conscious composition and these essays are nearly four times as long as the earlier ones. The subjects are very

'Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws hd more influence on politics and Rousseau's novels on the feelings and life of two generations.

varied and the titles are often mere pegs to hang ideas upon. There is not much about Virgil nor even about Latin poetry in the essay on the "Verses of Virgil", and there is still less about coaches in "des Coches." Nowhere is there any trace of searching for subject or effect. He notes what comes into his mind, and as it comes. He tells us what he thinks about what happens to interest him. His work has all the charm of nature and not a little of hidden art.'

In his style and vocabulary Montaigne profited by Ronsard, but he was no blind follower. He saw the danger of indiscriminate innovation. “Keen minds," he says, "bring no new words into the language, but with a cautious ingenuity they apply to it unaccustomed mutations. And," he adds in words that might apply as well to the symbolists of our day as to the rhetoriqueurs of his own, "how little it is in the power of all to do this appears in very many French writers of this century. They are bold enough and disdain to follow the beaten track. But lack of invention and of discretion ruins them. Their work reveals only a wretched affectation of singularity, with cold and absurd metaphors that amuse rather than elevate their subject. If only such men can gorge themselves with what is novel, they are indifferent to what is effective. To sieze the new they will abandon the usual which is often the stronger and the more vigorous."

It cannot be denied that Montaigne's average prose is better than the average prose of Ronsard, and his best is almost the best that France has to show. Naturally, therefore, it was the subject of narrow criticism by Malherbe and the early Academicians. But while Balzac and Vaugelas fettered and puttered, and while Boileau taught the French muse to pick her cautious way along the strait and narrow path of his coldly objective classicism, while the Pleiad

1

On

Montaigne was translated into English by Florio in time to be used by Shakspere, and Florio has had many and distinguished successors. Montaigne there is an essay in Emerson's Representative Men" and two excellent books by Paul Stapfer, "Montaigne" in the Grands écrivains français, and “ La Famille et les amis de Montaigne.”

was discredited and Ronsard forgotten save by La Bruyère, the naturalists of the sixteenth century lived stubbornly on. Rabelais and Montaigne were still widely read, and their unfettered independence did much to shorten the triumph of literary absolutism, just as the tendency of their thought contributed to shorten the reign of political tyranny. It was not until wise rules had been broken together with cramping fetters by the Romantic revolt that Ronsard was restored to honor by precisely that movement in French literature with which he has least in common, but no revolution of taste or criticism has ever shaken the universal recognition of the greatness of Rabelais and Montaigne.

B. W. WElls.

OUR FIRST NOVELIST.

Charles Brockden Brown was born in Philadelphia of Quaker parents, on the seventeenth of January, 1771, his ancestors coming over with William Penn. From his early years he showed a studious nature, and at the age of eleven he was placed in the school of Mr. Proud, in Philadelphia, under whose tutelage he studied Greek and Latin very successfully, and also did a large course of English reading. His bodily health was naturally delicate, which prevented his engaging in outdoor sports, and he quitted this school a little before he was sixteen. He had previously made some poetical attempts, sketching the outlines of three epics, on the discovery of America, and the conquests of Mexico and Peru, but no signs of these attempts are now extant. Like many another literary aspirant, he decided on the law as a profession, but spent every minute he could steal away from his graver studies in the pursuit of more agreeable literature. Naturally he became more and more opposed to entering upon the practice of his profession as the time of his graduation approached, so he tried to justify his retreat from it by drawing on his imagination, and claiming that the calling had something immoral in it. To his friends, this decision seemed to blight his whole future life. Shortly afterward he visited New York, and in 1798 he practically settled there, becoming a member of the Friendly Club, a congenial company, and seeming to be much exalted in spirit by his new surroundings, for in three years he published no fewer than six novels. In 1801 he returned to Philadelphia, three years later marrying Miss Elizabeth Linn, daughter of a noted Presbyterian minister of New York. In 1806 his health failed so rapidly that he was constrained to take several trips for its restoration, which took him through various parts of New York and New Jersey, and occupied a good part of the years 1807 and 1808. They seemed to benefit