LANGUAGES. 361 



Tory had previously condemned by his denunciation of the " skimmers of 

 Latin " in the preface to " Champfleury," which contains an " exhortation to 

 set the French language in good order, so as to speak with elegance in good 

 and wholesome French" (Fig. 302). Rabelais, while very justly ridiculing 

 the jargon of the French students, was not himself sufficiently on his guard 

 against erudition of style, but he none the less raised to the highest degree of 

 perfection the language of the sixteenth century. Clement Marot and like 

 poets of his school, Bonaventure des Periers and others, sought their models, 

 as Francois Villon had done, in the authors of the thirteenth century, and 

 they were the custodians of the real French language, clear and transparent, 

 precise and correct, elegant and witty. Calvin and several Protestant writers 

 belong to this school, but their style was harder, colder, and somewhat 

 colourless. 



The sixteenth century teems with chefs-d'oeuvre of every kind, but the 

 finest productions of French genius are tainted with Neologism, Hellenism, 

 and Latinism, and the courtier-like and Italianised language, as Henri Estienne 

 termed it in his treatise upon this subject, permeated from the court of the 

 Yalois into the spoken rather than into the written language. For the most 

 part it was the poets and the best of them into the bargain who, owing to 

 their affection for Greek, Latin, and Italian, became the demolishers and 

 ravagers of the French language. Ronsard and the Pleiade were the main 

 promoters of this deplorable change. (See below, chapter on National Poetry.) 

 The prose-writers, on the other hand, set themselves against this sacrilege, 

 and resolutely remained French. Historians such as Blaise de Montluc, 

 humanists like Amyot, polemists like Henri Estienne, narrators like Bona- 

 venture des Periers and Noel du Fail, and moralists like Montaigne, show 

 that the French language was still known in France. 



But the worst enemies of the French language were the reformers of 

 grammar and spelling, Jacques Pelletier, Louis Meigret, and Pierre Ramus. 

 These extravagant philosophers, who wanted to change the whole system of 

 language, were far more absurd than the Limoges student of Geoffrey Tory 

 and of Rabelais, and the good sense of the general public prevented them 

 from making many proselytes. What little success they did obtain was 

 neutralised soon afterwards by Montaigne and Malherbe. Of the former M. 

 Francis Wey says, " His was a wit at once unrestrained, undulating, and 

 various ; his genius was supple, disdained iinj>erious doctrines, and was pro- 



3 A 



