e. In virtue alike of his popularization of an encyclopedic
store of knowledge and of his underlying doctrine--the worship of
Nature--he ranks as a true forerunner of the great movement of the
Renaissance.

The intellectual stirring, which seemed to be fore-shadowed by the
second part of the _Roman de la Rose_, came to nothing. The disasters
and confusion of the Hundred Years War left France with very little
energy either for art or speculation; the horrors of a civil war
followed; and thus the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are perhaps
the emptiest in the annals of her literature. In the fourteenth century
one great writer embodied the character of the time. FROISSART has
filled his splendid pages with 'the pomp and circumstance of glorious
war'. Though he spent many years and a large part of his fortune in the
collection of materials for his history of the wars between France and
England, it is not as an historian that he is now remembered; it is as a
writer of magnificent prose. His _Chroniques_, devoid of any profundity
of insight, any true grasp of the movements of the age, have rarely been
paralleled in the brilliance and animation of their descriptions, the
vigour of their character-drawing, the flowing picturesqueness of their
style. They unroll themselves like some long tapestry, gorgeously
inwoven with scenes of adventure and chivalry, with flags and spears and
chargers, and the faces of high-born ladies and the mail-clad figures of
knights. Admirable in all his descriptions, it is in his battle-pieces
that Froissart particularly excels. Then the glow of his hurrying
sentences redoubles, and the excitement and the bravery of the combat
rush out from his pen in a swift and sparkling stream. One sees the
serried ranks and the flashing armour, one hears the clash of weapons
and the shouting of the captains: 'Montjoie! Saint Denis! Saint George!
Giane!'--one feels the sway and the press and the tumult, one laments
with the vanquished, one exults with the victors, and, amid the
glittering panoply of 'grand seigneur, conte, baron, chevalier, et
escuier', with their high-sounding titles and their gallant prowess, one
forgets the reverse side of all this glory--the ravaged fields, the
smoking villages, the ruined peasants--the long desolation of France.

The Chronicles of Froissart are history seen through the eyes of a
herald; the _Memoirs_ of PHILIPPE DE COMMYNES are history envisaged by a
politician and a dipl