ibliographers of eminence, La Croix du Maine, and Du Verdier, made
their appearance. But the works of all these, as rather ancillary to
literature than actually literary, must here be passed over.

FOOTNOTES:

[209] Cauvin or Chauvin is the more correct form, but the Latinised
Calvinus made Calvin more usual. Calvin's works are voluminous. The
_Institution_ was published in convenient shape at Paris in 1859.

[210] Most of Amyot is accessible only in the old editions. A beautiful
edition of the _Daphnis and Chloe_ has been published by L. Glady.
London, 1878.

[211] Dolet's works are not easily to be found except in public
libraries. The standard book on him is that of Mr. R. C. Christie
(London, 1880), one of the best monographs on French literary history to
be found in any language.

[212] 2 vols. Paris, 1849.

CHAPTER VII.

MONTAIGNE AND BRANTOME.

[Sidenote: Disenchantment of the late Renaissance.]

A period of enthusiasm passes naturally and almost necessarily into one
of scepticism, and it is in no way surprising that the prominent
literary figure of the second half of the sixteenth century in France
should have taken for his motto rather 'Que sais-je?' than, like
Rabelais, 'Sursum Corda.' The early hopes of the Renaissance had been
curiously disappointed. The Reformation had resulted not merely in cruel
and destructive civil war, but in the formation, in too many cases, of a
Protestantism not less imperious and far more illiberal than the
Catholicism against which it protested. The economic and social effects
of the discovery of the New World had been equally discouraging, and
even the recovery of classical learning had produced a race of pedants
almost as trifling as the last doting defenders of scholasticism. The
evils of the civil state of France, moreover, drove nearly all the best
men into the sect of _Politiques_, or Trimmers, who avowedly regarded
high questions of truth and faith as subordinate to a politic
opportunism. The age had not lost its power of enjoyment of affairs and
of pleasure, but its appetite for higher things was somewhat blunted. In
this state of matters a few persons, of whom Montaigne was incomparably
the most important, philosophised sceptically about life, and a great
many, of whom Brantome is the most typical, took pleasure in describing
the ways and acts of an aristocracy which combined extraordinary luxury
and corruption with great love of wit, singular intellect