pidity in Church and State,
and, above all, applies his wit to expose the vices and infirmities
of women. The earliest Poetic in French--_L'art de dictier et de fere
chancons, balades, virelais, et rondeaulx_ (1392)--is the work of
Eustache Deschamps, in which the poet, by no means himself a master
of harmonies, insists on the prime importance of harmony in verse.

The exhaustion of the mediaeval sources of inspiration is still more
apparent in the fifteenth-century successors of Deschamps. But
already something of the reviving influence of Italian culture makes
itself felt. CHRISTINE DE PISAN, Italian by her parentage and place
of birth (_c_. 1363), was left a widow with three young children at
the age of twenty-five. Her sorrow, uttered in verse, is a genuine
lyric cry; but when in her poverty she practised authorship as a trade,
while she wins our respect as a mother, the poetess is too often at
once facile and pedantic. Christine was zealous in maintaining the
honour of her sex against the injuries of Jean de Meun; in her prose
_Cite des Dames_ she celebrates the virtues and heroism of women,
with examples from ancient and modern times; in the _Livre des Trois
Vertus_ she instructs women in their duties. When advanced in years,
and sheltered in the cloister, she sang her swan-song in honour of
Joan of Arc. Admirable in every relation of life, a patriot and a
scholar, she only needed one thing--genius--to be a poet of
distinction.

A legend relates that the Dauphiness, Margaret of Scotland, kissed
the lips of a sleeper who was the ugliest man in France, because from
that "precious mouth" had issued so many "good words and virtuous
sayings." The sleeper was Christine's poetical successor, ALAIN
CHARTIER. His fame was great, and as a writer of prose he must be
remembered with honour, both for his patriotic ardour, and for the
harmonious eloquence (modelled on classical examples) in which that
ardour found expression. His first work, the _Livre des Quatre Dames_,
is in verse: four ladies lament their husbands slain, captured, lost,
or fugitive and dishonoured, at Agincourt. Many of his other poems
were composed as a distraction from the public troubles of the time;
the title of one, widely celebrated in its own day, _La Belle Dame
sans Mercy_, has obtained a new meaning of romance through its
appropriation by Keats. In 1422 he wrote his prose _Quadrilogue
Invectif_, in which suffering France implores the nobles, the c