The first great French artists were of the seventeenth century, and although Clouet was painter to Francis I. and Henry II., the former, like his predecessors, imported artists from Italy, among whom were Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini.

In letters, however, there were French women of the sixteenth century who are still famous.  Marguerite de Valois was as cultivated in mind as she was generous and noble in character.  Her love of learning was not easily satisfied.  She was proficient in Hebrew, the classics, and the usual branches of “profane letters,” as well as an accomplished scholar in philosophy and theology.  As an author—­though her writings are somewhat voluminous and not without merit—­she was comparatively unimportant; her great service to letters was the result of the sympathy and encouragement she gave to others.

Wherever she might be, she was the centre of a literary and religious circle, as well as of the society in which she moved.  She was in full sympathy with her brother in making his “College” an institution in which greater liberty was accorded to the expression of individual opinion than had before been known in France, and by reason of her protection of liberty in thought and speech she suffered much in the esteem of the bigots of her day.

The beautiful Mlle. de Heilly—­the Duchesse d’Etampes—­whose influence over Francis I. was pre-eminent, while her character was totally unlike that of his sister, was described as “the fairest among the learned, and the most learned among the fair.”  When learning was thus in favor at Court, it naturally followed that all capacity for it was cultivated and ordinary intelligence made the most of; and the claim that the intellectual brilliancy of the women of the Court of Francis I. has rarely been equalled is generally admitted.  There were, however, no artists among them—­they wielded the pen rather than the brush.

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In England, as in France, there was no native school of art in the sixteenth century, and Flemish, Dutch, and German artists crossed the channel when summoned to the English Court, as the Italians crossed the Alps to serve the kings of France.

English women of this century were far less scholarly than those of Italy and France.  At the same time they might well be proud of a queen who “could quote Pindar and Homer in the original and read every morning a portion of Demosthenes, being also the royal mistress of eight languages.”  With our knowledge of the queen’s scholarship in mind we might look to her for such patronage of art and literature as would rival that of Lorenzo the Magnificent; but Elizabeth lacked the generosity of the Medici and that of Marguerite de Valois.  Hume tells us that “the queen’s vanity lay more in shining by her own learning than in encouraging men of genius by her liberality.”