his time. He served Charles the Rash and Louis XI.; and, after so
trying an experience, he depicted them and passed judgment upon them with
imperturbable clearsightedness and freedom of thought. With the recital
of events, as well as the portrayal of character, he mingles here and
there the reflections, expressed in precise, firm, and temperate
language, of a profound moralist, who sets before himself no other aim
but that of giving his thoughts full utterance. He has already been
spoken of in the second volume of this History, in connection with his
leaving the Duke of Burgundy's service for that of Louis XI., and with
his remarks upon the virtues as well as the vices of that able but
unprincipled despot. We will not go again over that ground. As a king's
adviser, Commynes would have been as much in place at the side of Louis
XIV. as at that of Louis XI.; as a writer, he, in the fifteenth century,
often made history and politics speak a language which the seventeenth
century would not have disowned.

Let us pass from the prose-writers of the middle ages to their poets.

The grand name of poesy is here given only to poetical works which have
lived beyond their cradles and have taken rank amongst the treasures of
the national literature. Thanks to sociability of manners, vivacity of
intellect, and fickleness of taste, light and ephemeral poesy has
obtained more success and occupied more space in France than in any other
country; but there are successes which give no title to enter into a
people's history; quality and endurance of renown are even more requisite
in literature than in politics; and many a man whose verses have been
very much relished and cried up in his lifetime has neither deserved nor
kept in his native land the beautiful name of poet. Setting aside, of
course, the language and poems of the troubadours of Southern France, we
shall find, in French poesy previous to the Renaissance, only three works
which, through their popularity in their own time, still live in the
memory of the erudite, and one only which, by its grand character and its
superior beauties, attests the poetical genius of the middle ages and can
claim national rights in the history of France. _The Romance of the
Rose_ in the erotic and allegorical style, the _Romances of Renart_ in
the satirical, and the _Farce of Patelin,_ a happy attempt in the line of
comedy, though but little known nowadays to the public, are still and
will rem