A History of French Literature

Walpole, Horace, 322 (#x10_x_10_i23)

Warens, Mme. de, 311 (#x9_pgepubid00058), 312 (#x10_x_10_i3), 318 (#x10_x_10_i13)

Wenceslas, Duke, 54 (#x2_x_2_i54)

THE END

notes

1

Gestes meant (1) deeds, (2) their history, (3) the heroic family.

2

Assonance, i.e. vowel-rhyme, without an agreement of consonants.

3

Verse of twelve syllables, with cesura after the sixth accented syllable. In the decasyllabic line the cesura generally followed the fourth, but sometimes the sixth, tonic syllable.

4

The epopee composed in Provençal, sung but not transcribed, is wholly lost. The development of lyric poetry in the South probably checked the development of the epic.

5

Not quite all, for certain borrowings were made from the correspondence of Alexander with Dindimus, King of the Brahmans, and from the Alexandri Magni iter ad Paradisum.

6

Chrétien de Troyes is the first poet to tell of the love of Lancelot for the Queen.

7

The earlier "Romulus" was the name of the supposed author of the fables of Phædrus, while that of Phædrus was still unknown.

8

Two works of the fourteenth century, interesting in the history of manners and ideas, may here be mentioned—the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour-Landry (1372), composed for the instruction of the writer's daughters, and the Ménagier de Paris, a treatise on domestic economy, written by a Parisian bourgeois for the use of his young wife.

9

The Chroniques were continued by lay writers to the accession of Louis XI.

10

Books I.-VI., written 1488-94; Books VII., VIII., written 1494-95.

11

Puy, mountain, eminence, signifying the elevated seat of the judges of the artistic competition.

12

Derived from ministerium (métier), but doubtless often drawing to itself a sense suggested by the mysteries of religion.

13

This corporation, known as the Royaume de la Basoche (basilica), was probably as old as the fourteenth century.

14

i.e. the Anacreontic poems, found, and published in 1554, by Henri Estienne.

15

The "Baïfin verse," French not classical, is of fifteen syllables, divided into hemistichs of seven and eight syllables.

16

The narrative of the life of Bayard, by his secretary, writing under the name of "Le Loyal Serviteur" (1527), is admirable for its clearness, grace, and simplicity.

17

The Mémoires-Journeaux of Pierre de l'Estoile are a great magazine of the gains of the writer's disinterested curiosity. The Lettres of D'Ossat and the Négotiations of the President Jeannin are of importance in the records of diplomacy.

18

Varro, who to a certain extent copied from Menippus the Gadarene, had called his satires Saturæ Menippeæ; hence the title.

19

It should be noted that the close of the Astrée is by D'Urfé's secretary Baro.

20

Or thirty-four pieces, if Théagène et Cariclée be reckoned as only one.

21

Polyeucte may possibly be as early as 1641.

22

Ed. 1662, surreptitious and incomplete; complete ed., 1868-1884.

23