to speak truth, was in far more danger of the stake than most of his friends.  The infidelity of Rabelais is a matter of inference only, and some critics (among whom the present writer ranks himself) see in his daring ridicule of existing abuses nothing inconsistent with a perfectly sound, if liberally conditioned, orthodoxy.  Desperiers, like Rabelais, was a Lucianist, but his modernising of Lucian (the remarkable book called Cymbalum Mundi), though pretending to deal with ancient mythology, has an almost unmistakable reference to revealed religion.  It is not, however, by this work or by this side of his character at all that Desperiers is brought into connection with the work of Margaret, who, if learned and liberal, and sometimes tending to the new ideas in religion, was always devout and always orthodox in fundamentals.  Besides the Cymbalum Mundi, he has left a curious book, not published, like the Heptameron itself, till long after his own death, and entitled Nouvelles Recreations et Joyeux Devis.  The tales of which it consists are for the most part very short, some being rather sketches or outlines of tales than actually worked-out stories, so that, although there are no less than a hundred and twenty-nine of them, the whole book is probably not half the bulk of the Heptameron itself.  But they are extremely well written, and the specially interesting thing about them is, that in them there appears, and appears for the first time (unless we take the Heptameron itself as earlier, which is contrary to all probability), the singular and, at any rate to some persons, very attractive mixture of sentiment and satire, of learning and a love of refined society, of joint devotion to heavenly and earthly love, of voluptuous enjoyment of the present, blended and shadowed with a sense of the night that cometh, which delights us in the prose of the Heptameron, and in the verse not only of all the Pleiade poets in France, but of Spenser, Donne, and some of their followers in England.  The scale of the stories, which are sometimes mere anecdotes, is so small, the room for miscellaneous discourse in them is so scanty, and the absence of any connecting links, such as those of Margaret’s own plan, checks the expression of personal feeling so much, that it is only occasionally that this cast of thought can be perceived.  But it is there, and its presence is an important element in determining the question of the exact authorship of the Heptameron itself.

It can hardly be said that, except translations from the Italian (of which the close intercourse between France and Italy in the days of the later Valois produced many), Margaret had many other examples before her.  For such a book as the Propos Rustiques of Noel du Fail, though published before her death, is not likely to have exercised any influence over her; and most other books of the kind are later than her own.  One such (for, despite its bizarre title and