His _Life_ was written in French by his fellow-worker in the Reformation, Theodore de Beze, who also recorded the history of the Reformed Churches in France (1580). Beze and Viret, together with their leader Calvin, were eminent in pulpit exposition and exhortation, and in Beze the preacher was conjoined with a poet. At Calvin's request he undertook his translation of the Psalms, to complete that by Marot, and in 1551 his sacred drama the _Tragedie Francaise du sacrifice d'Abraham_, designed to inculcate the duty of entire surrender to the divine will, and written with a grave and restrained ardour, was presented at the University of Lausanne. CHAPTER II FROM THE PLEIADE TO MONTAIGNE The classical Renaissance was not necessarily opposed to high ethical ideals; it was not wholly an affair of the sensuous imagination; it brought with it the conception of Roman virtue, and this might well unite itself (as we see afterwards in Corneille) with Christian faith. Among the many translators of the sixteenth century was Montaigne's early friend--the friend in memory of all his life--ETIENNE DE LA BOETIE (1530-63). It is not, however, for his fragments of Plutarch or his graceful rendering of Xenophon's Economics (named by him the _Mesnagerie_) that we remember La Boetie; it is rather for his eloquent pleading on behalf of freedom in the _Discours de la Servitude Volontaire_ or _Contr'un_, written at sixteen--revised later--in which, with the rhetoric of youth, he utters his invective against tyranny. Before La Boetie's premature death the morals of antiquity as seen in action had been exhibited to French readers in the pages of Amyot's delightful translation of Plutarch's Lives (1559), to be followed, some years later, by his _OEuvres Morales de Plutarque_. JACQUES AMYOT (1513-93), from an ill-fed, ragged boy, rose to be the Bishop of Auxerre. His scholarship, seen not only in his Plutarch, but in his rendering of the _Daphnis et Chloe_ of Longus, and other works, was exquisite; but still more admirable was his sense of the capacities of French prose. He divined with a rare instinct the genius of the language; he felt the affinities between his Greek original and the idioms of his own countrymen; he rather re-created than translated Plutarch. "We dunces," wrote Montaigne, "would have been lost, had not this book raised us from the mire; thanks to it, we now venture to speak and write; ... it is our breviary." The life and the ideas of the ancient world became the possession, not of scholars only, but of all French readers. The book was a school of manners and of thought, an inspirer of heroic deeds. "To love Plutarch," said the greatest Frenchman of the century, Henry of Navarre, "is to love me, for he was long the master of my youth."