h, and equally
repelled by some of the dogmas and by the apparent {194} social effects
of the Reformation, Bude, who had spoken well of Luther in 1519,
repudiated him in 1521.

[Sidenote: Humanists]

Finally there was the party of the "Libertines" or free-thinkers, the
representatives of the Renaissance pure and simple. Revolutionaries in
their own way, consciously rebels against the older culture of the
Middle Ages, though prepared to canvass the new religion and to toy
with it, even to use it as an ally against common enemies, the interest
of these men was fundamentally too different from that of the Reformers
to enable them to stand long on the same platform. There was Clement
Marot, [Sidenote: Marot] a charming but rather aimless poet, a protege
of Margaret and the ornament of a frivolous court. Though his poetic
translation of the Psalms became a Protestant book, his poetry is often
sensual as well as sensuous. Though for a time absenting himself from
court he re-entered it in 1536 at the same time "abjuring his errors."

[Sidenote: Rabelais]

Of the same group was Francis Rabelais, whose _Pantagruel_ appeared in
1532. Though he wrote Erasmus saying that he owed all that he was to
him, he in fact appropriated only the irony and mocking spirit of the
humanist without his deep underlying piety. He became a universal
skeptic, and a mocker of all things. The "esprit gaulois," beyond all
others alive to the absurdities and inconsistency of things, found in
him its incarnation. He ridiculed both the "pope-maniacs" and the
"pope-phobes," the indulgence-sellers and the inquisitors, the
decretals "written by an angel" and the Great Schism, priests and kings
and doubting philosophers and the Scripture. Paul III called him "the
vagabond of the age." Calvin at first reckoned him among those who
"had relished the gospel," but when he furiously retorted that he
considered Calvin "a demoniacal imposter," the theologian of Geneva
loosed against him a furious invective in his {195} _Treatise on
Offences_. Rabelais was now called "a Lucian who by his diabolic
fatuity had profaned the gospel, that holy and sacred pledge of life
eternal." William Farel had in mind Rabelais's recent acceptance from
the court of the livings of Meudon and St. Christophe de Jambet, when
he wrote Calvin on May 25, 1553: "I fear that avarice, that root of
evil, has extinguished all faith and piety in the poets of Margaret.
Judas, having sol