ad been cast, and without unduly stiffening them produced a
regularity of form which was entirely novel. Even when his sentences are
of considerable length, there is clearness and simplicity in them, which
in some languages, English for instance, was not generally reached in
prose till much later. It is remarkable, too, that the besetting sin of
serious French prose, its tendency to the declamatory, is well kept
under by Calvin. Next to the graceful stateliness of his phrase, its
extreme sobriety, not rejecting legitimate ornament, but seldom or never
trespassing into the rhetorical, has to be observed. Considering that
the whole of it was written before the author was seven-and-twenty, it
is perhaps the most remarkable work of its particular kind to be
anywhere found--the merits being those of full maturity and elaborate
preparation rather than of youthful exuberance. The book consists of
four parts; the first on God, the second on the Atonement, or rather on
the Mediatorial Office of Christ, the third on the results of that
Office, the fourth on Church Government. Its end, it need hardly be
said, is double--the establishment in the most rigorous form of the
doctrine of predestination and original sin, and the destruction of the
sacramental and sacerdotal doctrines of the Catholic Church.

[Sidenote: Minor Reformers and Controversialists.]

Despite the fervid interest taken in religious disputation and the
masterly example which Calvin had set both to friends and foes, theology
proper did not contribute very much of value to literature during the
period. Beza wrote chiefly in Latin, his _Histoire des Eglises
Reformees_ being the chief exception. Pierre Viret, a Swiss by birth,
who passed the last twenty years of his life at various towns in the
south of France as a preacher and theological teacher, wrote a
considerable number of treatises, both serious and satirical. The titles
of some of the latter, _L'Alchimie du Purgatoire_, _La Cosmographie
Infernale_, etc., are characteristic of the time. But Viret's literary
merit was not remarkable. This kind of theological pasquinading was in
great favour throughout the period, and authors of very various merit,
such as Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde, Dore, Claude de Saintes, Arthus
Desire, and others, contributed plentifully to it. But the interest of
their work is for the most part historical and antiquarian only. The
title of 'Protestant Rabelais' has been absurdly given to Marn