aculty itself.

[Sidenote: Subsidiary importance of Brantome and other
character-mongers.]

The last point, as an apparent digression but really a most important
contribution to the History, may perhaps be discussed and dismissed
first. All persons who have even a slight knowledge of French literature
must be aware how early and how remarkable are its possessions in what
is vaguely called the "Memoir" department. There is nothing at the time,
in any modern literature known to the present writer, similar to
Villehardouin, or a little later to Joinville,--one might almost say
that there is nothing in any literature at any time superior, if there
be anything equal, in its kind to Froissart. In the first two cases
there is pure personal experience; in the third there is, of course, a
certain amount of precedent writing on the subject for guidance, and a
large gathering of information by word of mouth. But in all these, and
to a less extent in others up to the close of the fifteenth century,
there is the indefinable gift of treatment--of "telling a story." In
Villehardouin this gift may be almost wholly, and in principle very
mainly, limited to the two great subjects which made the mediaeval end
as far as profane matters were concerned--fighting and counselling; but
this is by no means the case in Froissart, whom one is sometimes tempted
to regard as a Sir Walter Scott thrown away upon base reality.

With the sixteenth century this gift once more burgeoned and spread
itself out--dealing, indeed, very mainly with the somewhat ungrateful
subject of the religious disputes and wars, but flowering or fruiting
into the unsurpassable gossip--though gossip is too undignified a
word--of Pierre de Bourdeilles, Abbe de Brantome, that Froissart and
Pepys in one, with the noble delight in noble things of the first,
inextricably united to the almost innocent shamelessness of the second,
and a narrative gift equal to that of either in idiosyncrasy, and
ranging beyond the subjects of both. Himself a soldier and a courtier
(his abbacy, like many others, was purely titular and profitable--not
professional in the least), his favourite subjects in literature, and
obviously his idols in life, were great soldiers and fair ladies,
"Bayard and the two Marguerites," as some one has put it. And his vivid
irregular fashion of writing adapts itself with equal ease to a gallant
feat of arms and a ferocious, half-cut-throat duel, to an exquisite
piece