icular
style and expression. The plan is, as has been said, taken from the
long-winded allegorical erotic poetry of the very late thirteenth, the
fourteenth, and the fifteenth centuries--poetry which is now among the
most difficult to read in any literature. The groundwork or canvas being
transferred from love to religion, it gains a little in freshness and
directness of purpose, but hardly in general readableness. Thus, for
instance, two whole pages of the _Miroir_, or some forty or fifty lines,
are taken up with endless playings on the words _mort_ and _vie_ and
their derivatives, such as _mortifiez, and mort fiez, mort vivifiee and
vie mourante_. The sacred comedies or mysteries have the tediousness
and lack of action of the older pieces of the same kind without their
_naivete_; and pretty much the same may be said of the profane comedy
(which is a kind of morality), and of the farce. Of _La Coche_, what has
been said of the long sacred poems may be said, except that here we
go back to the actual subject of the models, not on the whole with
advantage: while in the minor pieces the same word plays and frigid
conceits are observable.

But if this somewhat severe judgment must be passed on the poems
as wholes, and from a certain point of view, it may be considerably
softened when they are considered more in detail. In not a few passages
of the religious poems Margaret has reached (and as she had no examples
before her except Marot's psalms, which were themselves later than at
least some of her work, may be said to have anticipated) that grave and
solemn harmony of the French Huguenots of the sixteenth century, which
in Du Bartas, in Agrippa d'Aubigne, and in passages of the tragedian
Montchrestien, strikes notes hardly touched elsewhere in French
literature. The _Triomphe de l'Agneau_ displays her at her best in this
respect, and not unfrequently comes not too far off from the apocalyptic
resonance of d'Aubigne himself. Again, the _Bergerie_ included in the
Nativity comedy or mystery, though something of a Dresden _Bergerie_ (to
use a later image), is graceful and elegant enough in all conscience.
But it is on the minor poems, especially the Epistles and the _Chansons
Spirituelles_, that the defenders of Margaret's claim to be a poet rest
most strongly. In the former her love, not merely for her brother, but
for her husband, appears unmistakably, and suggests graceful thoughts.
In the latter the force and fire which occ