plucked us out of the mire. Thanks
to it, we dare to speak and to write. By it ladies are in a position to
give lessons to schoolmasters. It is our very breviary.' This praise,
which is not exaggerated in itself, and still less when taken as an
expression of the feeling of the time, refers of course to the
'Plutarch,' and in estimating it it is necessary to take account of
Montaigne's especial affection for the author translated. But if we take
in the lighter work, and especially the _Daphnis and Chloe_, Amyot will
stand higher, not lower. His merit is not so much that he has known how
to adjust himself and his style to two very different authors, but that
in rendering both those authors he has written French of a most original
model and of the greatest excellence. The common fault of translation,
the insensible adoption of a foreign idiom--especially difficult to
avoid at a time when no classical standards or models of the tongue used
by the translator exist--is here almost entirely overcome. The style of
Amyot, who had little before him, if Calvin and Rabelais be excepted,
but the clumsy examples of the _rhetoriqueur_ school, is, as Montaigne
justly says, perfectly simple and pure; and so little is it tinged
either with archaism or with classicism that the seventeenth century
itself, unjust as it was for the most part towards its predecessors,
acknowledged its merit.

[Sidenote: Minor Translators.]

[Sidenote: Dolet.]

Although Amyot was by far the most considerable of the French
translators of the sixteenth century, he was not by any means the first.
Claude de Seyssel translated many Greek authors, Pierre Saliat produced
a version of Herodotus, Lefevre d'Etaples was the author of the first
complete French translation of the Bible, and a cluster of learned
writers, some of them remarkable for other work, such as Bonaventure des
Periers, devoted themselves to Plato. Among these latter there is one
who was in many ways a typical representative of the time. Etienne
Dolet[211] was born at Orleans in 1509, lived a stormy life diversified
by many quarrels, literary and theological, did much service to
literature both in Latin and French, and, falling out with the powers
that were, was burnt (having first been, as a matter of grace and in
consequence of a previous recantation, hanged) in the Place Maubert, at
Paris, on his birthday, August 3, 1554. Dolet had written many Latin
speeches and tractates in the Ciceronian sty