pattern of his
faithful followers the Scotch Presbyterians. He was once banished, but
recalled, and exercised his sway for about a quarter of a century. Into
the too famous and much argued matters of his relations with Servetus,
his intrigues with the French inquisitors to establish a kind of
_Zollverein_ of persecution and the like, there is no need to enter
here. He died in 1564. Calvin's greatest work in literature, as in
theology, is the _Institution of the Christian Religion_, which, as has
been said, was published at Basle in 1536. It was written in Latin, but
four years later was republished in French, the author himself being the
translator. The minor works of Calvin, both in Latin and French, are
very numerous, but from the point of view of literary history they may
be neglected, except certain satirical pamphlets wherein the writer
displayed a considerable command of vigorous, if occasionally clumsy,
satire and invective. The scurrility with which the debates of the
Reformation were carried on on both sides is but too well known. Calvin
was not so guilty in this respect as Luther, but he must bear a
considerable portion of the blame. What is really valuable in Calvin's
satiric style may be found more worthily represented in the less
abstract passages of the _Institution_, notably the Address to the King.

The _Institution_ itself is beyond all question the first serious work
of great literary merit, not historical, in the history of French prose.
It is strongly Latinised in form and construction, as might indeed be
expected considering the circumstances of its production. But the point
in which it differs from preceding works in which the classical
influence is prominent, is that the author no longer attempts to give
his classical colour by means of wholesale importations of terms. The
vocabulary, though rich and varied, is still in the main genuine French,
and the Latinism is more observable in occasional constructions and in
the architecture of the clauses than in the mere selection of words.
This clause-architecture was a matter of the last importance, for it was
exactly in this respect that French, like most of the vernacular
tongues, was deficient. The entirely artless and mainly conversational
array of the sentence which, out of verse, had hitherto been common,
served for narrative well enough, but not at all for argument or
discussion. Calvin threw his French clauses into the mould in which his
Latin h