e et sourcil,
Comme un navet qu'on ret ou pelle.
Repos eternel donne a cil.
Rigueur le transmit en exil
Et luy frappa au cul la pelle,
Non obstant qu'il dit "J'en appelle!"
Qui n'est pas terme trop subtil.
Repos eternel donne a cil._

CLEMENT MAROT.

If in Charles of Orleans the first note of the French Renaissance is
heard, if in Villon you find first its energy appearing above ground,
yet both are forerunners only.

With Marot one is in the full tide of the movement. The discovery of
America had preceded his birth by three or perhaps four years. His early
manhood was filled with all that ferment, all that enormous branching
out of human life, which was connected with the expansion of Spain; he
was in the midst of the scarlet and the gold. A man just of age when
Luther was first condemned, living his active manhood through the
experience of the great battlefields in Italy, wounded (a valet rather
than a soldier) at Pavia, the perpetual chorus of Francis I., privileged
to witness the first stroke of the pickaxe against the mediaeval Louvre,
and to see the first Italian dignity of the great stone houses on the
Loire--being all this, the Renaissance was the stuff on which his life
was worked.

His blood and descent were typical enough of the work he had to do. His
own father was one of the last set rhymers of the dying Middle Ages. All
his boyhood was passed among that multitude of little dry "writers-down
of verse" with which, in Paris, the Middle Ages died; they were not a
swarm, for they were not living; they were a heap of dust. All his early
work is touched with the learned, tedious, unbeautiful industry which
was all that the elder men round Louis XII could bring to letters. By a
happy accident there were mixed in him, however, two vigorous springs of
inspiration, each ready to receive the new forces that were working in
Europe, each destined to take the fullest advantage of the new time.
These springs were first, learned Normandy, quiet, legal, well-founded,
deep in grass, wealthy; and secondly, the arid brilliancy of the South:
Quency and the country round Cahors. His father was a Norman pure bred,
who had come down and married into that sharp land where the summer is
the note of the whole year, and where the traveller chiefly remembers
vineyards, lizards on the walls, short shadows, sleep at noon, and
blinding roads of dust. The firs