kind, and if we could do otherwise than pronounce that kind hopelessly bad, are without doubt ingenious. His poems are chiefly occasional verse, letters, _debats_, etc., besides ballades and rondeaux of all kinds. [Sidenote: Chansons du XV'eme Siecle.] One charming book which has been preserved to us gives a pleasant contrast to the formal poetry of the time. The _Chansons du XV'eme Siecle_, which M. Gaston Paris has published for the Old French Text Society[164], exhibit informal and popular poetry in its most agreeable aspect. They are one hundred and forty-three in number, some of them no doubt much older than the fifteenth century, but certainly none of them younger. There are _pastourelles_, war-songs, love-songs in great number, a few patriotic ditties, and a few which may be called pure folksongs, with the story half lost and only a musical tangle of words remaining. Nothing can be more natural and simple than most of these pieces. [Sidenote: Preachers.] Few of the miscellaneous branches of literature at this time deserve notice. But there was a group of preachers who have received attention, which is said by students of the whole subject of the mediaeval pulpit in France to be disproportionate, but which they owe perhaps not least to the citations of them in a celebrated and amusing book of the next age, the _Apologie pour Herodote_ of Henri Estienne. These are Menot (1440-1518) and Maillard the Franciscans, and Raulin (1443-1514), a doctor of the Sorbonne. These preachers, living at a time which was not one of popular sovereignty, did not meddle with politics as preachers had done in France before and were to do again. But they carried into the pulpit the habit of satirical denunciation in social as well as in purely religious matters, and gave free vent to their zeal. No illustrations of the singular licence which the middle ages permitted on such occasions are more curious than these sermons. Not merely did the preachers attack their audience for their faults in the most outspoken manner, but they interspersed their discourses (as indeed was the invariable custom throughout the whole middle ages) with stories of all kinds. In Raulin, the gravest of the three, occurs the famous history of the church bells, which reappears in Rabelais, _a propos_ of the marriage of Panurge. FOOTNOTES: [153] Villon sut le premier, dans ces siecles grossiers, Debrouiller l'art confus de nos vieux romanciers. _Art Poet._ Ch. 1. [154] Ed. P. L. Jacob. Paris, 1854. Villon's life has been the subject of numerous elaborate investigations, the latest and best of which is that of A. Longnon. Paris, 1877. Dr. Bijvanck, a Dutch scholar, has dealt since with the MSS. [155] One of these anecdotes makes him patronised by Edward the _Fifth_ of England. But the very terms of it are unsuitable to that king.