aborated and reduced to rule; ballade,
chant royal, lai, virelai, rondeau were the established forms, and
lyric verse was often used for matter of a didactic, moral, or
satirical tendency. Even Ovid was tediously moralised (_c_. 1300)
in some seventy thousand lines by Chretien Legouais. Literary
societies or _puys_[1] were instituted, which maintained the rules
of art, and awarded crowns to successful competitors in poetry; a
formal ingenuity replaced lyrical inspiration; poetry accepted
proudly the name of "rhetoric." At the same time there is gain in
one respect--the poets no longer conceal their own personality behind
their work: they instruct, edify, moralise, express their real or
simulated passions in their own persons; if their art is mechanical,
yet through it we make some acquaintance with the men and manners
of the age.

[Footnote 1: _Puy_, mountain, eminence, signifying the elevated seat
of the judges of the artistic competition.]

The chief exponent of the new art of poetry was GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT.
Born about 1300, he served as secretary to the King of Bohemia, who
fell at Crecy. He enjoyed a tranquil old age in his province of
Champagne, cultivating verse and music with the applause of his
contemporaries. The ingenuities of gallantry are deployed at length
in his _Jugement du Roi de Navarre_; he relates with dull prolixity
the history of his patron, Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, in
his _Prise d'Alexandrie_; the _Voir dit_ relates in varying verse
and prose the course of his sexagenarian love for a maiden in her
teens, Peronne d'Armentieres, who gratified her coquetry with an old
poet's adoration, and then wedded his rival.

In the forms of his verse EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS, also a native of
Champagne (_c_. 1345-1405), was a disciple of Machaut: if he was not
a poet, he at least interests a reader by rhymed journals of his own
life and the life of his time, written in the spirit of an honest
bourgeois, whom disappointed personal hopes and public misfortune
had early embittered. Eighty thousand lines, twelve hundred ballades,
nearly two hundred rondeaux, a vast unfinished satire on woman, the
_Miroir de Mariage_, fatigued even his own age, and the official court
poet of France outlived his fame. He sings of love in the conventional
modes; his historical poems, celebrating events of the day, have
interest by virtue of their matter; as a moralist in verse he deplores
the corruption of high and low, the cu