d building on the site of the Hotel de Nesle,
and to put Erasmus at the head of the College Royal. War incessantly
renewed and the nascent religious troubles interfered with his
resolutions; but William Bude never ceased to urge upon the king an
extension of the branches of learning in the establishment; and after the
Peace of Cambrai in 1529, chairs of mathematics, Oriental languages,
Latin oratory, Greek and Latin philosophy, and medicine were successively
added to the chairs of Hebrew and Greek which had been the original
nucleus of instruction in the College Royal. It continued to be an
object of suspicion to the Sorbonne and of hesitation in the Parliament,
to which royalty had recourse against the attacks of its adversaries.
But it had no lack of protectors, nevertheless: the Cardinal of Lorraine,
Charles IX., and Catherine de' Medici herself supported it in its trials;
and Francis I. had the honor of founding a great school of the higher
sort of education, a school, which, throughout all the religious
dissensions and all the political revolutions of France, has kept its
position and independence, whatever may have been elsewhere, in the
matter of public instruction, the system and the regimen of state
establishments.

A few words have already been said about the development of the arts,
especially architecture and sculpture, in the middle ages, and of the
characteristics, original and national, Gallic and Christian, which
belonged to them at this period, particularly in respect of their
innumerable churches, great and small. A foreglance has been given of
the alteration which was brought about in those characteristics, at the
date of the sixteenth century, by the Renaissance, at the same time that
the arts were made to shine with fresh and vivid lustre. Francis I. was
their zealous and lavish patron; he revelled in building and embellishing
palaces, castles, and hunting-boxes, St. Germain, Chenonceaux,
Fontainebleau, and Chambord; his chief councillors, Chancellor Duprat and
Admiral Bonnivet, shared his taste and followed his example; several
provinces, and the banks of the Loire especially, became covered with
splendid buildings, bearing the marks of a complicated character which
smacked of imitations from abroad. Italy, which, from the time of
Charles VIII. and Louis XII., had been the object of French kings'
ambition and the scene of French wars, became also the school of French
art; national and solemn C