for her under a king unhampered by largely appanaged and only nominally dependent princes. It should be said that the Memoires of Comines are not a continuous history. The first six books deal with the reign of Louis XI. from 1465 to 1483. But the seventh is busied with Charles the Eighth's Italian wars only, the author having passed over the period of his own disgrace. Besides the Memoirs we possess a collection of _Lettres et Negotiations_.[158] [Sidenote: Coquillart.] There are three persons who, while of very much less importance than those just introduced to the reader, deserve a mention in passing as characteristic and at the same time meritorious writers, during the second and third quarters of the fifteenth century, the extreme verge of which the life of all three appears to have touched. These are Guillaume Coquillart, Henri Baude, and Martial d'Auvergne. All three were poets, all three have been somewhat over-praised by the scholars who in days more or less recent have drawn them from their obscurity, but all three made creditable head against what was mistaken and absurd in the literary fashions of the time. In the writings of all of them moreover there is to be found something, if not much, which is positively good, and which deserves the attention, hardly perhaps of the general reader, but of students of literature. Coquillart[159] was a native, and for great part of his life an inhabitant, of Rheims. The extreme dates given for his birth and death are 1421 and 1510, but there is in reality, as is usual in the case of all men of letters before the sixteenth century, very little solid authority for his biography. It may be mentioned that Marot declares him to have cut short his life by gaming. A life can hardly be said to be cut short at ninety, nor is that an age at which gaming is a frequent ruling passion. All that can be said is that he was certainly, as we should now say, in the civil service of the province of Champagne during the reign of Louis XI., that like many other men of the time he united ecclesiastical with legal functions, being not only a town-councillor but a canon, and that he has left satirical works of some merit and importance. These last alone concern us much. His chief production is a poem entitled _Les Droits Nouveaux_, in octosyllabic verses, not arranged in stanzas of definite length, but, on the other hand, interlacing the rhymes, and not in couplets after the older fashion. The plan of this poem is by no means easy to describe. It is partly a social satire, partly a professional lampoon on the current methods of learning and teaching law, partly a political diatribe on the alterations introduced into provincial and national life and polity under Louis XI. Not very different in character and exactly similar in form, except that it is arranged as the age would have said _par personnages_, that is to say semi-dramatically, is the _Plaidoyer de la Simple et de la Rusee_. The _Blason des Armes et des