me.'
But his notes on the previous history of literature in France, though
necessarily based on somewhat imperfect knowledge, are full of
interest, and not destitute of instruction, such, for instance, as his
chapters on the farce of _Pathelin_, on Provencal poetry, on the formal
measures of the fourteenth century, etc. Pasquier's style is very
delightful. Despite his erudition, and even what may be called his
Ronsardising, he does not aim at the new severity and classicism. But
his manner is exceedingly picturesque, perfectly clear, and
distinguished by a sort of gossiping ingenuousness without any lack of
dignity, the secret of which the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries in France and England seem to have possessed and carried off
with them.

[Sidenote: Henri Estienne.]

The third of three not dissimilar names is that of Henri Estienne. His
remarkable _Apologie pour Herodote_, like not a few other works of the
same kind, would be less remarkable if it were stripped of borrowed
plumes; but his three treatises on French linguistics, the _Traite de la
Conformite du Francais avec le Grec_, the _Precellence de la Langue
Francaise_, and the _Nouveaux Dialogues de Langage Francais Italianise_,
would give him a considerable place in the history of French literature
if he had written no _Apologie_ and published no _Thesaurus_. All three
works are more or less directed against the Italianising mania of the
day.

[Sidenote: Herberay.]

Here, perhaps, better than elsewhere, may be mentioned the name of one
of the best, if not the best, purely narrative writer of French prose
during the century, Herberay des Essarts. It is to Herberay that the
famous romance of _Amadis of Gaul_ owes most of its fame. According to
the most probable story, the _Amadis_ was originally translated by the
Spaniard Montalvo from a lost Portuguese original of the fourteenth
century. There is absolutely no trace of a French original, the
existence of which has been assumed by French critics. In form the
_Amadis_ is a long prose Roman d'Aventures, distinguished only from its
French companions and predecessors by a somewhat higher strain of
romantic sentiment, and by a greater abundance of giants, dwarfs,
witches, and other condiments, which, even in its most luxuriant day,
the simpler and more academic French taste had known how to do without,
or at most, to apply moderately. It had been continued in the Spanish by
more than one author, and wa