in a very extended literary
history. Most of them, in the words of one of their number, took
continual lessons _es oeuvres Cretiniques et Bouchetiques_, and some
of them succeeded at last in imitating the dulness of Bouchet and the
preposterous mannerisms of Cretin. Perhaps no equal period in all early
French history produced more and at the same time worse verse than the
reign of Louis XII. Fortunately, however, a true poet, if one of some
limitations, took up the tradition, and showed what it could do. Marot
has sometimes been regarded as the father of modern French poetry,
which, unless modern French poetry is limited to La Fontaine and the
poets of the eighteenth century, is absolutely false. He is sometimes
regarded as the last of mediaeval poets, which, though truer, is false
likewise. What he really was can be shown without much difficulty.

[Sidenote: Clement Marot.]

Clement Marot[170] was a man of more mixed race than was usual at this
period, when the provincial distinctions were still as a rule maintained
with some sharpness. His father, Jean Marot, a poet of merit, was a
Norman, but he emigrated to Quercy, and Marot's mother was a native of
Cahors, a town which, from its Papal connections, as well as its
situation on the borders of Gascony, was specially southern. Clement was
born probably at the beginning of 1497, and his father educated him with
some pains in things poetical. This, as times went, necessitated an
admiration of Cretin and such like persons, and the practice of
rondeaux, and of other poetry strict in form and allegorical in matter.
As it happened, the discipline was a very sound one for Marot, whose
natural bent was far too vigorous and too lithe to be stiffened or
stunted by it, while it unquestionably supplied wholesome limitations
which preserved him from mere slovenly facility. It is evident, too,
that he had a sincere and genuine love of things mediaeval, as his
devotion to the _Roman de la Rose_ and to Villon's poems, both of which
he edited, sufficiently shows. He 'came into France,' an expression of
his own, which shows the fragmentary condition of the kingdom even at
this late period, when he was about ten years old. His father held an
appointment as 'Escripvain' to Anne of Brittany, and accompanied her
husband to Genoa in 1507. The University of Paris, and a short sojourn
among the students of law, completed Clement's education, and he then
became a page to a nobleman, thus obtain