it, a furious partisan, who went so far as to excuse the murder of
the Duke of Orleans, and Jean Charlier, or Gerson, one of the most
respectable and considerable names of the later mediaeval literature.
Gerson was born in 1363, at a village of the same name in Lorraine. He
early entered the College de Navarre, and distinguished himself under
Peter d'Ailly, the most famous of the later nominalists. He became
Chancellor of the University, received a living in Flanders, and for
many years preached in the most constantly attended churches of Paris.
He represented the University at the Council of Constance, and, becoming
obnoxious to the Burgundian party, sought refuge with one of his
brothers at Lyons, where he is said to have taught little children. He
died in 1429. Gerson, it should perhaps be added, is one of the numerous
candidates (but one of the least likely) for the honour of having
written the _Imitation_. He concerns us here only as the author of
numerous French sermons. His work in this kind is very characteristic of
the time. Less mixed with burlesque than that of his immediate
successors, it is equally full of miscellaneous, and, as it now seems,
somewhat inappropriate erudition, and far fuller of the fatal
allegorising and personification of abstract qualities which were in
every branch of literature the curse of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Yet there are passages of real eloquence in Gerson, though
perhaps the chief literary point about him is the evidence he gives of
the insufficiency of the language in its then condition for serious
prose work.

[Sidenote: Moral and Devotional Treatises.]

[Sidenote: Translators.]

[Sidenote: Political and Polemical Works.]

This is indeed the lesson of most of the writing which we have to notice
in this chapter. Next to sermons may most naturally be placed devotional
and moral works, for, as may easily be imagined, theology and
philosophy, properly so called, did not condescend to the vulgar tongue
until after the close of the period. Only treatises for the practical
use of the unlearned and ignorant adopted the vernacular. Of such there
are manuals of devotion and sketches of sacred history which date from
the thirteenth century, besides numerous later treatises, among the
authors of which Gerson is again conspicuous. The most popular, perhaps,
and in a way the most interesting of all such moral and devotional
treatises, is the book of the Chevalier de la T