is more eminent successors is swift and steep.
The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse from burlesque mirth
or bitter invective to gross terrors, in which death and judgment,
Satan and hell-fire were largely displayed. The sermons of Michel
Menot and Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure of
sin, sometimes trivial or grotesque, sometimes pedantic in their
exhibition of learning, have at least an historical value in
presenting an image of social life in the fifteenth century.

A word must be said of the humanism which preceded the Renaissance.
Scholars and students there were in France two hundred years before
the days of Erasmus and of Bude; but they were not scholars inspired
by genius, and they contented themselves with the task of translators,
undertaken chiefly with a didactic purpose. If they failed to
comprehend the spirit of antiquity, none the less they did something
towards quickening the mind of their own time and rendering the French
language less inadequate to the intellectual needs of a later age.
All that was then known of Livy's history was rendered into French
in 1356 by the friend of Petrarch, Pierre Bercuire. On the suggestion
of Charles V., Nicole Oresme translated from the Latin the Ethics,
Politics, and Economics of Aristotle. It was to please the king that
the aged Raoul de Presles prepared his version of St. Augustine's
_De Civitate Dei_, and Denis Foulechat, with very scanty scholarship,
set himself to render the _Polycraticus_ of John of Salisbury. The
dukes of Bourbon, of Berry, of Burgundy, were also patrons of letters
and encouraged their translators. We cannot say how far this movement
of scholarship might have progressed, if external conditions had
favoured its development. In Jean de Montreuil, secretary of Charles
VI., the devoted student of Cicero, Virgil, and Terence, we have an
example of the true humanist before the Renaissance. But the seeming
dawn was a deceptive aurora; the early humanism of France was clouded
and lost in the tempests of the Hundred Years' War.

III
HISTORY

While the mediaeval historians, compilers, and abbreviators from
records of the past laboured under all the disadvantages of an age
deficient in the critical spirit, and produced works of little value
either for their substance or their literary style, the chroniclers,
who told the story of their own times, Villehardouin, Joinville,
Froissart, Commines, and others, have bequeathed