For the moment—and the fact connects itself sharply and decisively with the delay of their critical reconstruction—the French busied themselves less, at least in appearance, with the exhumation and investigation of their own literature. Nowhere was more solid work really done; nowhere were the foundations of mediæval study, in particular, laid once for all with such admirable thoroughness. But for a long time the workers cast their bread upon the waters: and the waters in turn cast it mostly upon alien shores. The mighty industry of Ducange—in method and quality as well as time of the seventeenth century, in effect scarcely to bear full fruit till the nineteenth—had been entirely included within the seventeenth itself. That of Sainte-Palaye, which has been alluded to, dates from the third quarter of the eighteenth. The magnificent _Histoire Littéraire de La France_, not finished yet, but unresting as unhasting, was begun as early as 1733; of the Frères Parfait we have also spoken; Barbazan’s invaluable collection of the _Fabliaux_ appeared in 1756. But, except it may be here and there on a man of genius like Fontenelle, those publications had no general literary effect. How little they had may perhaps best be gauged by the fact that the travestied and rococo _Corps d’Extraits de Romans_ of the Comte de Tressan, published long after all of them, _had_ such an effect, and did rather more harm than good. Still, the two giants of the French Renaissance, earlier and later, Rabelais and Montaigne, always kept a hold, and did for France something, though less, of the good which the great quartette—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton—did for England. Ronsard, as we have seen, kept, in the worst of times, the respect and the appreciation of men so different in date and character as Fénelon and Marmontel: while, if the celebrated “worship of Lubricity” had something to do with the resuscitation of others by Prosper Marchand, &c., let this be counted for righteousness even to the slippery goddess who has so little!