542 CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS ORATORY. 



of the doctors of the school, were more than once touched and confounded as 

 they listened to the proud and simple utterances of their prisoner ; and Joan 

 of Arc, cruelly accused of imaginary crimes, returned with a smile upon her 

 face to her prison, saying to her gaolers, who looked upon her as a sorceress, 

 " Do not be afraid ; I shall not fly away ; I am not an angel." Her replies, 

 so simple, and yet so telling, often sublime, and always true, are not the least 

 striking evidence of her Divine mission. 



In the meanwhile the art of oratory seemed to authorise the most extreme 

 license of speech. The same speaker could venture, without fear of discredit, 

 to support in turn the most diametrically opposed doctrines. So willed it that 

 sphinx of the schools called Dialectics, and these contradictory statements 

 did not strike any one as being blamable. Thus all speakers, whether of 

 the bar or of the pulpit, were considered to be inviolable, and no one ever 

 thought of calling any of them to account for what they had said. Even 

 Louis XI., despot as he was, did not dare to interfere with the utterances of 

 the preachers. The latter had not the same immunity in Italy which they 

 enjoyed in France, for they were kept under control not only by the eccle- 

 siastical, but by the civil authorities. Thus Jerome Savonarola (Fig. 402), 

 whose original, abundant, and indomitable eloquence had led him to attack 

 the greatest and most powerful of human institutions, was more than once 

 compelled to quit the pulpit, and after having been interdicted, and even 

 excommunicated, he was imprisoned by order of the Seigniory of Florence, 

 and condemned to be burnt alive ao a heretic (May 23rd, 1498). 



The oratory of the bar was more restrained and dignified. In truth, the 

 involved and sententious prolixity of the lawyers did not deserve the name of 

 oratory, and their pedantic language, bristling with subtleties borrowed from 

 scholasticism, was not calculated to move or to carry away their hearers. We 

 must, however, cite a few pleaders who, like Jacques ilarechal, La Vacquerie, 

 and Antoine Duprat, combined with the science of the jurisconsult force, and 

 in some cases elegance, of diction. But most of the preachers, who affected 

 a sort of rough and uncouth eloquence appealing to popular intelligence, 

 belonged to the trivialist school which Gabriele Barletta had created at 

 Naples, where his burlesque sermons had an extraordinary success. It was 

 after this jack-pudding type that the art of preaching was everywhere 

 reduced to this one axiom : " Nescit predicare qui iiescit barlettare " (" No one 

 knows how to preach if he cannot imitate Barletta "). Barletta's example was, 



