n manner, have something in common with the stories of the
_Heptameron_, died in desperation by his own hand about 1543. His
Lucianic dialogues which compose the _Cymbalum Mundi_ show the
audacity of scepticism which the new ideas of the Renaissance
engendered in ill-balanced spirits. With all his boldness and ardour
Rabelais exercised a certain discretion, and in revising his own text
clearly exhibited a desire to temper valour with prudence.

It is remarkable that just at the time when Rabelais published the
second and best book of his _Pantagruel_, in which the ideality and
the realism of the Renaissance blossom to the full, there was a certain
revival of the chivalric romance. The Spanish _Amadis des Gaules_
(1540-48), translated by Herberay des Essarts, was a distant echo
of the Romances of the Round Table. The gallant achievements of
courtly knights, their mystical and platonic loves, were a delight
to Francis I., and charmed a whole generation. Thus, for the first
time, the literature of Spain reached France, and the influence of
_Amadis_ reappears in the seventeenth century in the romances of
d'Urfe and Mdlle. de Scudery.

If the genius of the Renaissance is expressed ardently and amply in
the writings of Rabelais, the genius of the Reformation finds its
highest and most characteristic utterance through one whom Rabelais
describes as the "demoniacle" of Geneva--JEAN CALVIN (1509-64). The
pale face and attenuated figure of the great Reformer, whose life
was a long disease, yet whose indomitable will sustained him amid
bodily infirmities, present a striking contrast to the sanguine
health and overflowing animal spirits of the good physician who
reckoned laughter among the means of grace. Yet Calvin was not merely
a Reformer: he was also a humanist, who, in his own way, made a profound
study of man, and who applied the learning of a master to the
determination of dogma. His education was partly theological, partly
legal; and in his body of doctrine appear some of the rigour, the
severity, and the formal procedures of the law. Indignation against
the imprisonment and burning of Protestants, under the pretence that
they were rebellious anabaptists, drew him from obscurity; silence,
he thought, was treason. He addressed to the King an eloquent letter,
in which he maintained that the Reformed faith was neither new nor
tending towards schism, and next year (1536) he published his lucid
and logical exposition of Protes