.

[115] A very early example of the special sense given to this word in
French increasingly during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, of "freethinker" deepening to "atheist." Johnson's friend, it
will be remembered, regarded Philosophy as something to which the
irruption of Cheerfulness was fatal; Butler, as something acquirable by
reading Alexander Ross; a famous ancient saying, as the remembrancer of
death; and a modern usage, as something which has brass and glass
"instruments." But it was Hegel, was it not? or Carlyle? who summarised
the French view and its time of prevalence in the phrase, "When every
one was a philosopher who did not believe in the Devil."

[116] His translations of the _Andria_ and of Plato's _Lysis_; and his
verses, the chief charm of which is to be found in his adoption of the
"cut and broken" stanzas which the French Renaissance loved.

[117] Not to be confused with _Jehan_ Bouchet the poet, a much older
man, indeed some twenty years older than Rabelais, and as dull as
Raminagrobis Cretin himself, but the inventor or discoverer of that
agreeable _agnomen_ "Traverseur des Voies Perilleuses" which has been
noted above.

[118] Cholieres, I think, deserves the prize for sinking lowest.

[119] From all the endless welter of abuse of God's great gift of speech
[and writing] about the French Revolution, perhaps nothing has emerged
more clearly than that its evils were mainly due to the sterilisation of
the regular Provincial assemblies under the later monarchy.

[120] A person not bad of blood will always be glad to mention one of
the few good sides of a generally detestable character; and a person of
humour must always chuckle at some of the ways in which Calvin's
services to French prose were utilised.

[121] He did not confine his good offices to romances of _caballeria_.
In 1539 he turned into French the _Arnalte and Lucenda_ of Diego de San
Pedro (author of the more widely known _Carcel de Amor_), a very curious
if also rather tedious-brief love-story which had great influence in
France (see Reynier, _op. cit. inf._ pp. 66-73). This (though M. Reynier
did not know it) was afterwards versified in English by one of our minor
Carolines, and will appear in the third volume of the collected edition
of them now in course of publication by the Clarendon Press.

[122] Not always. Nouzhatoul-aouadat is certainly not as musical as
Pintiquinestra, though Nouronnihar as certainly