of converging causes, of which the most important were the
diffusion of classical literature consequent upon the break-up of the
Byzantine Empire at the hands of the Turks, the brilliant civilization
of the Italian city-states, and the establishment, in France, Spain and
England, of powerful monarchies whose existence ensured the maintenance
of order and internal peace. Thus it happened that the splendid
literature of the Ancient World--so rich in beauty and so significant in
thought--came into hands worthy of receiving it. Scholars, artists and
thinkers seized upon the wondrous heritage and found in it a whole
unimagined universe of instruction and delight. At the same time the
physical discoveries of explorers and men of science opened out vast
fresh regions of speculation and adventure. Men saw with astonishment
the old world of their fathers vanishing away, and, within them and
without them, the dawning of a new heaven and a new earth. The effect on
literature of these combined forces was enormous. In France
particularly, under the strong and brilliant government of Francis I,
there was an outburst of original and vital writing. This literature,
which begins, in effect, what may be called the distinctively _modern_
literature of France, differs in two striking respects from that of the
Middle Ages. Both in their attitude towards art and in their attitude
towards thought, the great writers of the Renaissance inaugurated a new
era in French literature.

The new artistic views of the age first appeared, as was natural, in the
domain of poetry. The change was one towards consciousness and
deliberate, self-critical effort. The medieval poets had sung with
beauty; but that was not enough for the poets of the Renaissance: they
determined to sing not only with beauty, but with care. The movement
began in the verse of MAROT, whose clear, civilized, worldly poetry
shows for the first time that tendency to select and to refine, that
love of ease and sincerity, and that endeavour to say nothing that is
not said well, which were to become the fundamental characteristics of
all that was best in French poetry for the next three hundred years. In
such an exquisite little work of art as his epistle in three-syllabled
verse--'A une Damoyselle Malade', beginning--

Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bonjour,

we already have, in all its completeness, that tone of mingled
distinction, gaiety and grace which is one of the un