de chambre_, and accompanied his
master to the battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and made prisoner.
Pursued by the Catholics as a heretic, and afterwards by the Genevan
Calvinists as a libertine, he was protected as long as was possible
by the King and by his sister. He died at Turin, a refugee to Italy,
in 1544.

In his literary origins Marot belongs to the Middle Ages; he edited
the _Roman de la Rose_ and the works of Villon; his immediate masters
were the _grands rhetoriqueurs_; but the spirit of the Renaissance
and his own genius delivered him from the oppression of their
authority, and his intellect was attracted by the revolt and the
promise of freedom found in the Reforming party. A light and
pleasure-loving nature, a temper which made the prudent conduct of
life impossible, exposed him to risks, over which, aided by protectors
whom he knew how to flatter with a delicate grace, he glided without
fatal mishap. He did not bring to poetry depth of passion or solidity
of thought; he brought what was needed--a bright intelligence, a sense
of measure and proportion, grace, gaiety, _esprit_. Escaping, after
his early _Temple de Cupido_, from the allegorising style, he learned
to express his personal sentiments, and something of the gay,
bourgeois spirit of France, with aristocratic distinction. His
poetry of the court and of occasion has lost its savour; but when
he writes familiarly (as in the _Epitre au Roi pour avoir ete derobe_),
or tells a short tale (like the fable of the rat and the lion), he
is charmingly bright and natural. None of his poems--elegies,
epistles, satires, songs, epigrams, rondeaux, pastorals,
ballades--overwhelm us by their length; he was not a writer of vast
imaginative ambitions. His best epigrams are masterpieces in their
kind, with happy turns of thought and expression in which art seems
to have the ease of nature. The satirical epistle supposed to be sent,
not by Marot, but by his valet, to Marot's adversary, Sagon, is
spirited in its insolence. _L'Enfer_ is a satiric outbreak of
indignation suggested by his imprisonment in the Chatelet on the
charge of heresy. His versified translation of forty-nine Psalms
added to his glory, and brought him the honour of personal danger
from the hostility of the Sorbonne; but to attempt such a translation
is to aim at what is impossible. His gift to French poetry is
especially a gift of finer art--firm and delicate expression,
felicity in rendering