terary form, Villon stands alone. For
others--Georges Chastelain, Meschinot, Molinet, Cretin--poetry was
a cumbrous form of rhetoric, regulated by the rules of those arts
of poetry which during the fifteenth century appeared at not
infrequent intervals. The _grands rhetoriqueurs_ with their
complicated measures, their pedantic diction, their effete allegory,
their points and puerilities, testify to the exhaustion of the Middle
Ages, and to the need of new creative forces for the birth of a living
literature.

There is life, however, in the work of one remarkable prose-writer
of the time--ANTOINE DE LA SALLE. His residence in Rome (1422) had
made him acquainted with the tales of the Italian _novellieri_; he
was a friend of the learned and witty Poggio; Rene of Anjou entrusted
to him the education of his son; when advanced in years he became
the author certainly of one masterpiece, probably of three. If he
was the writer of the _Quinze Joies de Mariage_, he knew how to mask
a rare power of cynical observation under a smiling face: the Church
had celebrated the fifteen joys of the Blessed Virgin; he would
ironically depict the fifteen afflictions of wedded life, in scenes
finely studied from the domestic interior. How far the _Cent Nouvelles
nouvelles_ are to be ascribed to him is doubtful; it is certain that
these licentious tales reproduce, with a new skill in narrative prose,
the spirit of indecorous mirth in their Italian models. The _Petit
Jehan de Saintre_ is certainly the work of Antoine de la Salle; the
irony of a realist, endowed with subtlety and grace, conducts the
reader through chivalric exaltations to vulgar disillusion. The
writer was not insensible to the charm of the ideals of the past,
but he presents them only in the end to cover them with disgrace.
The anonymous farce of _Pathelin_, and the _Chronique de petit Jehan
de Saintre_, are perhaps the most instructive documents which we
possess with respect to the moral temper of the close of the Middle
Ages; and there have been critics who have ventured to ascribe both
works to the same hand.

II
THE DRAMA

The mediaeval drama in France, though of early origin, attained its
full development only when the Middle Ages were approaching their
term; its popularity continued during the first half of the sixteenth
century. It waited for a public; with the growth of industry, the
uprising of the middle classes, it secured its audience, and in some
measure fil