It is useless to carry these quotations any further; they are sufficient to give an idea of the grand character of the poem in which so many traits of really touching affection and so many bursts of patriotic devotion and pious resignation are mingled with the merest brute courage.  Such, in its chief works, philosophical, historical, and poetical, was the literature which the middle ages bequeathed to the reign of Francis I. In history only, and in spite of the new character assumed afterwards by the French language, this literature has had the honor of preserving its nationality and its glory.  Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, and Commynes have remained great writers.  In philosophy and in poesy a profound revolution was approaching; the religious reform and the fine literary genius as well as the grand French language of the seventeenth century were preparing to rise above the intellectual horizon.  But between the moment when such advances dawn and that when they burst forth there is nearly always a period of uncertain and unfruitful transition:  and such was the first half of the sixteenth century, that is to say, the actual reign of Francis I.; it is often called the reign of the Renaissance, which certainly originated in his reign, but it did not grow and make any display until after him; the religious, philosophical, and poetical revolution, Calvin, Montaigne, and Ronsard, born in the earlier half of the seventeenth century, did not do anything that exercised any power until the later.  One single poet, a third-rate one, Clement Marot, attained lustre under Francis I. Rabelais is the only great prose writer who belongs strictly to that period.  The scholars, the learned critics of what had been left by antiquity in general and by Greek and Roman antiquity in particular, Bude (Budaeus), J. C. Scaliger; Muretus, Danes (Danesius), Arnyot, Ramus (Peter la Ramee), Robert Estienne (Stephanus), Vatable (Watebled), Cujas, and Turnebius make up the tale of literature specially belonging to and originating in the reign of Francis I., just as the foundation of the College Royal, which became the College de France, is his chief personal claim to renown in the service of science and letters.

Let us return to the poets of the actual reign of Francis I. The first we encounter speaks thus of himself:—­

“I am not rich; that, certes, I confess;
But, natheless, well born and nobly bred;
I’m read by both the people and noblesse,
Throughout the world:  ‘That’s Clement,’ it is said. 
Men live their span; but I shall ne’er be dead. 
And thou—­thou hast thy meadow, well, and spring,
Wood, field, and castle—­all that wealth can bring. 
There’s just that difference ’twixt thee and me. 
But what I am thou couldst not be:  the thing
Thou art, why, anybody else might be.”