The spirit and substance of these treatises seems to have been caught up and embodied, about the year 1500, in another Rhetoric,[159] which became very popular, and was known by such titles as the “Flower” or “Garden of Rhetoric,” but the author of which is only known by one of those agreeably conceited _noms de guerre_ so frequent at the time, as “‘l’Infortunaté’” Its matter appeared, without much alteration or real extension, in the works of Pierre Fabri[160] and Gratien du Pont (1539),[161] and the actual birth of French criticism proper is postponed, by most if not all historians, till the fifth decade of the century, when Pelletier translated the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace in 1545, while Sibilet wrote an original _Art Poétique_ three years later, and just before Du Bellay’s epoch-making _Défense_. ----- Footnote 159: _L’Instructif de la seconde Rhétorique_, or _Le Jardin de Plaisance_. Footnote 160: _Grant et vray art de pleine Rhétorique_, Rouen, 1521. Footnote 161: _Rhétorique Métrifiée_, Paris, 1539. Between Fabri and Gratien du Pont appeared in 1529 Geoffrey Tory’s _Champfleury_, a more grammatical than critical miscellany, which is elsewhere glanced at; and the very noteworthy critical remarks prefixed by Marot to his edition of Villon in 1533. M. Gaston Paris is assuredly right when he calls this (in his charming little book on the author of the _Ballade des Pendus_, Paris, 1901) “un des plus anciens morceaux de critique littéraire que l’on ait écrits en français,” and its appreciative sympathy, if not co-extensive with the merits of the work, leaves little to desire in the points which it touches. In fact, the mere selection of Villon and of the _Roman de la Rose_, as the subjects of his editorial care, shows in Master Clement the presence of a deep instinctive critical faculty, which has only partially and incidentally developed itself. In this, as in not a few other points, Marot himself seems to me to have had for the most part inadequate justice from critics; though here as elsewhere it may be allowed that time and circumstance prevented him from doing himself justice. His intense affection for literature and poetry, the light glancing quality of his wit and intellect, the absence of all pomposity, pedantry, and parade, and the shrewd sense which (in judgment if not quite in conduct) distinguished him, go very far to constitute the equipment of the accomplished critic. But his short life, perhaps a certain instability of character, and the immature condition of the special state of literature in his time, with the ever-deplorable distractions of the religious upheaval, gave him little chance. -----