successes of
statecraft, and the lessons of conduct to be noticed in or extracted
from the business in hand. With this purpose he is perpetually
digressing. The affairs of one country remind him of something that has
happened in another, and he stops to give an account of this. To a
certain extent the mediaeval influence is still strong on Comines,
though it shows itself in connection with evidences of the modern
spirit. He is religious to a degree which might be called ostentatious
if it were not pretty evidently sincere; and this religiosity is shown
side by side with the exhibition of a typically unscrupulous and
non-moral, if not positively immoral, statecraft. Again, his reflexions,
though usually lacking neither in acuteness nor in depth, are often
appended to a commonplace on the mutability of fortune, the error of
anger, the necessity of adapting means to ends, and so forth. Everywhere
in Comines is evident, however, the anti-feudal and therefore
anti-mediaeval conception of a centralised government instead of a loose
assemblage of powerful vassals. The favourite mediaeval ideal, of which
Saint Simon was perhaps the last sincere champion, finds no defence in
Comines; and it seems only just to allow him, in his desertion of the
Duke of Burgundy, some credit for drawing from the anarchy of the Bien
Public, and from his observations of Germany, England, and Spain, the
conclusion that France must be united, and that union was only possible
for her under a king unhampered by largely appanaged and only nominally
dependent princes. It should be said that the Memoires of Comines are
not a continuous history. The first six books deal with the reign of
Louis XI. from 1465 to 1483. But the seventh is busied with Charles the
Eighth's Italian wars only, the author having passed over the period of
his own disgrace. Besides the Memoirs we possess a collection of
_Lettres et Negotiations_.[158]

[Sidenote: Coquillart.]

There are three persons who, while of very much less importance than
those just introduced to the reader, deserve a mention in passing as
characteristic and at the same time meritorious writers, during the
second and third quarters of the fifteenth century, the extreme verge of
which the life of all three appears to have touched. These are
Guillaume Coquillart, Henri Baude, and Martial d'Auvergne. All three
were poets, all three have been somewhat over-praised by the scholars
who in days more or less recent h