ommonly attributed to Martial, is entitled
_L'Amant rendu Cordelier au service de l'Amour_, a piece of amorous
allegory at once characteristic of the later middle ages, and free from
the faults usually found in such work. A prose work of a somewhat
similar kind, entitled _Arrets d'Amour_, is known to be Martial's. In no
writer is there to be found more of the better part of Marot, as in the
light skipping verses:--

Mieux vault la liesse,
L'accueil et l'addresse,
L'amour et simplesse,
De bergers pasteurs,
Qu'avoir a largesse
Or, argent, richesse,
Ne la gentillesse
De ces grants seigneurs.

Car ils ont douleurs
Et des maulx greigneurs,
Mais pour nos labeurs
Nous avons sans cesse
Les beaulx pres et fleurs,
Fruitages, odeurs
Et joye a nos coeurs
Sans mal qui nous blesse.

There is something of the old _pastourelles_ in this, and of a note of
simplicity which French poetry had long lost.

[Sidenote: The Rhetoriqueurs.]

Such verse as this of Martial d'Auvergne was, indeed, the exception at
the time. The staple poetry of the age was that of the _grands
rhetoriqueurs_, as it has become usual to call them, apparently from a
phrase of Coquillart's. Georges Chastellain[162] was the great master of
this school. But to him personally some injustice has been done. His
pupils and successors, however, for the most part deserve the ill repute
in which they are held. This school of poetry had three principal
characteristics. It affected the most artificial forms of the artificial
poetry which the fourteenth century had seen established, the most
complicated modulations of rhyme, such as the repetition, twice or even
thrice at the end of a line, of the same sound in a different sense, and
all the other puerilities of this particular Ars Poetica. Secondly, it
pursued to the very utmost the tradition of allegorising, of which the
_Roman de la Rose_ had established the popularity. Thirdly, it followed
the example set by Chartier and his contemporaries of loading the
language as much as possible with Latinisms, and in a less degree,
because Greek was then but indirectly known, Graecisms. These three
things taken together produced some of the most intolerable poetry ever
written. The school had, indeed, much vitality in it, and overlapped the
beginnings of the Renaissance in such a manner that it will be necessary
to take note of it again in the nex