s a strong one with French writers of the middle age
and Renaissance, to lose sight of this in endless developments of mere
amusing buffoonery, is constantly resisted. There is certainly less
exaggeration in the _Menippee_ than in _Hudibras_, though the personal
weaknesses of the innumerable individual persons satirised contribute
more to the general effect than they do in Butler's great satire. The
distinguishing trait of the _Satyre Menippee_, next to those already
mentioned, is the constant rain of slight ironical touches contributing
to the general effect. Thus the arms of the processioning Leaguers are,
'le tout rouille par Humilite Catholique;' the League scholastics and
preachers 'forment tous leurs arguments in _ferio_.' The deputies'
benches are covered with cloth, 'parsemees de croisettes de Lorraine et
de larmes miparties de vair et de faux argent.' These sure and rapid
touches distinguish the book strongly from nearly all mediaeval satire,
in which the satirists are wont, whenever they make a point, to dwell on
it, and expound it, and illustrate it, and make the most of it, until it
loses almost all its piquancy. Very different from this over-elaboration
is the confident irony of the _Menippee_, which trusts to the
intelligence of the reader for understanding and emphasis. 'Vous
prevoyez bien,' says Mayenne, 'les dangers et inconveniens de la paix
qui met ordre a tout, et rend le droit a qui il appartient.' Hardly even
Antoine de la Salle, and certainly no other among the authors of the
preceding centuries, would have ventured to leave this, obvious as it
seems now-a-days, to reach the reader by itself.

[Sidenote: Regnier.]

A similar but a still more remarkable, because an individually complete,
example of the combination of Gallican tradition with classical study
was soon afterwards shown by Mathurin Regnier[223]. Regnier was born at
Chartres on the 21st of December, 1573, his father being Jacques
Regnier, a citizen of position; his mother was Simonne Desportes, sister
of the poet. Jacques Regnier desired for his son the ecclesiastical, but
not the poetical, eminence of his brother-in-law, and Mathurin was
tonsured at nine years old. The boy, however, wished to follow his
uncle's steps in the other direction, and early began to write. It is
said that he wrote lampoons on the inhabitants of his native town, and,
repeating them to the frequenters of a tennis-court which his father had
built, got himself th