he gossip of genius. No philosophical, theological, ethical, or
political work deserving account was written in French prose before the
beginning of the sixteenth century. The very language remained utterly
unfitted for any such use. Its vocabulary, though enormously rich in
mere volume, was destitute of terms of the subtlety and precision
necessary for serious prose; its syntax was hardly equal to anything but
a certain loose and flowing narration, which, when turned into the
channel of argument, became either bald or prolix. The universal use of
Latin for graver purposes had stunted and disabled it. At the same time
great changes passed over the language itself. In the fourteenth century
it lost with its inflections not a little of its picturesqueness, and
had as yet hit upon no means of supplying the want. The loose
orthography of the middle ages had culminated in a fantastic redundance
of consonants which was reproduced in the earliest printed books. This,
as readers of Rabelais are aware, was an admirable assistance to
grotesque effect, but it was fatal to elegance or dignity except in the
omnipotent hands of a master like Rabelais himself. In the fifteenth
century, moreover, the stereotyped forms of poetry were losing their
freshness and grace while retaining their stately precision. The faculty
of sustained verse narrative had fled the country, only to return at
very long intervals and in very few cases. The natural and almost
childish outspokenness of early times had brought about in all
departments of comic literature a revolting coarseness of speech. The
farce and the prose tale almost outdo the more naif _fabliau_ in this.
Nothing like a critical spirit had yet manifested itself in matters
literary, unless the universal following of a few accepted models may be
called criticism. The very motives of the mediaeval literature, its
unquestioning faith, its sense of a narrow circle of knowledge
surrounded by a vast unknown, its acceptance of classes and orders in
church and state (tempered as this acceptance had been by the sharpest
satire on particulars but by hardly any argument on general points),
were losing their force. Everything was ready for a renaissance, and the
next book will show how the Renaissance came and what it did.

BOOK II.

THE RENAISSANCE.

CHAPTER I.

VILLON, COMINES, AND THE LATER FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

[Sidenote: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance.]

[Sidenote: Characteri