tin
antiquity. Clearness, precision, ordonnance, sobriety, intellectual
energy are compensations for his lack of grace, imagination,
sensibility, and religious unction. He wrote to convince, to impress
his ideas upon other minds, and his austere purpose was attained.
In the days of the pagan Renaissance, it was well for France that
there should also be a Renaissance of moral rigour; if freedom was
needful, so also was discipline. On the other hand, it may be admitted
that Calvin's reason is sometimes the dupe of Calvin's reasoning.

His _Life_ was written in French by his fellow-worker in the
Reformation, Theodore de Beze, who also recorded the history of the
Reformed Churches in France (1580). Beze and Viret, together with
their leader Calvin, were eminent in pulpit exposition and
exhortation, and in Beze the preacher was conjoined with a poet. At
Calvin's request he undertook his translation of the Psalms, to
complete that by Marot, and in 1551 his sacred drama the _Tragedie
Francaise du sacrifice d'Abraham_, designed to inculcate the duty
of entire surrender to the divine will, and written with a grave and
restrained ardour, was presented at the University of Lausanne.

CHAPTER II
FROM THE PLEIADE TO MONTAIGNE

The classical Renaissance was not necessarily opposed to high ethical
ideals; it was not wholly an affair of the sensuous imagination; it
brought with it the conception of Roman virtue, and this might well
unite itself (as we see afterwards in Corneille) with Christian faith.
Among the many translators of the sixteenth century was Montaigne's
early friend--the friend in memory of all his life--ETIENNE DE LA
BOETIE (1530-63). It is not, however, for his fragments of Plutarch
or his graceful rendering of Xenophon's Economics (named by him the
_Mesnagerie_) that we remember La Boetie; it is rather for his
eloquent pleading on behalf of freedom in the _Discours de la
Servitude Volontaire_ or _Contr'un_, written at sixteen--revised
later--in which, with the rhetoric of youth, he utters his invective
against tyranny. Before La Boetie's premature death the morals of
antiquity as seen in action had been exhibited to French readers in
the pages of Amyot's delightful translation of Plutarch's Lives
(1559), to be followed, some years later, by his _OEuvres Morales
de Plutarque_. JACQUES AMYOT (1513-93), from an ill-fed, ragged boy,
rose to be the Bishop of Auxerre. His scholarship, seen not only in
his Pluta