ay, the orator of the _tiers etat_, closes the debate with a
speech in turn indignant, ironical, or grave in its commiseration
for the popular wrongs--an utterance of bourgeois honesty and good
sense. The writers--Canon Pierre Leroy; Gillot, clerk-advocate of
the Parliament of Paris; Rapin, a lettered combatant at Ivry; Jean
Passerat, poet and commentator on Rabelais; Chrestien and Pithou,
two Protestants discreetly converted by force of events--met in a
room of Gillot's house, where, according to the legend, Boileau was
afterwards born, and there concocted the venom of their pamphlet.
Its wit, in spite of some extravagances and the tedium of certain
pages, is admirable; farce and comedy, sarcasm and moral prudence
alternate; and it had the great good fortune of a satire, that of
coming at the lucky moment.

[Footnote 5: Varro, who to a certain extent copied from Menippus the
Gadarene, had called his satires _Saturae Menippeae_; hence the
title.]

The French Huguenots were not without their poets. Two of
these--Guillaume Saluste, Seigneur du Bartas, and Agrippa
d'Aubigne--are eminent. The fame of DU BARTAS (1544-90) was indeed
European. Ronsard sent him a pen of gold, and feared at a later time
the rivalry of his renown; Tasso drew inspiration from his verse;
the youthful Milton read him with admiration in the rendering by
Sylvester; long afterwards Goethe honoured him with praise beyond
his deserts. To read his poems now, notwithstanding passages of vivid
description and passages of ardent devotional feeling, would need
rare literary fortitude. His originality lies in the fact that while
he was a disciple of the Pleiade, a disciple crude, intemperate, and
provincial, he deserted Greece and Rome, and drew his subjects from
Hebraic sources. His _Judith_ (1573), composed by the command of
Jeanne d'Albret, has more of Lucan than of Virgil in its over-emphatic
style. _La Sepmaine, ou la Creation en Sept Journees_, appeared in
1578, and within a few years had passed through thirty editions. Du
Bartas is always copious, sometimes brilliant, sometimes majestic;
but laboured and rhetorical description, never ending and still
beginning, fatigues the mind; an encyclopaedia of the works of
creation weighs heavily upon the imagination; we sigh for the arrival
of the day of rest.

THEODORE-AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE (1550-1630) was not among the admirers
of Du Bartas. His natural temper was framed for pleasure; at another
time he might