_ generally mingled with their narrative interest
that spice of raillery and satire constantly so dear to the French
literary appetite. Thibaud was, in a double sense, a royal singer of
songs; for he reigned over Navarre, as well as chanted sweetly in verse
his love and longing, so the disputed legend asserts, for Queen Blanche
of Castile. Thibaud bears the historic title of The Song-maker. He has
been styled the Beranger of the thirteenth century. To Thibaud is said
to be due the introduction of the feminine rhyme into French poetry,--a
metrical variation of capital importance. The songs of Abelard, in the
century preceding Thibaud, won a wide popularity.

Prose, meantime, had been making noteworthy approaches to form.
Villehardouin must be named as first in time among French writers of
history. His work is entitled, "Conquest of Constantinople." It gives an
account of the Fourth Crusade. Joinville, a generation later, continues
the succession of chronicles with his admiring story of the life of
Saint Louis, whose personal friend he was. But Froissart of the
fourteenth century, and Comines of the fifteenth, are greater names.
Froissart, by his simplicity and his narrative art, was the Herodotus,
as Philip de Comines, for his political sagacity, has been styled the
Tacitus, of French historical literature. Up to the time of Froissart,
the literature which we have been treating as French was different
enough in form from the French of to-day to require what might be called
translation in order to become generally intelligible to the living
generation of Frenchmen. The text of Froissart is pretty archaic, but it
definitely bears the aspect of French.

With the name of Comines, who wrote of Louis XI. (compare Walter Scott's
"Quentin Durward"). we reach the fifteenth century, and are close upon
the great revival of learning which accompanied the religious
reformation under Luther and his peers. Now come Rabelais, boldly
declared by Coleridge one of the great creative minds of literature; and
Montaigne, with those Essays of his, still living, and, indeed, certain
always to live. John Calvin, meantime, writes his "Institutes of the
Christian Religion" in French as well as in Latin, showing once and for
all, that in the right hands his vernacular tongue was as capable of
gravity as many a writer before him had superfluously shown that it was
capable of levity. Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, is a French writer
of power, wi