du Songecreux_ ranks among the most remarkable examples of the liberty which was accorded to the press under the reign of Louis XII., a king who inherited some affection for literature from his father, Charles d'Orleans, and a keen perception of the importance of literary co-operation in political work from his ancestor, Philippe le Bel, and his cousin Louis XI. In precision and strikingness of expression Jehan recalls Villon; in the boldness of his satire on the great and the bitterness of his attacks on the character of women he recalls Antoine de la Salle and Coquillart. A trait illustrating the former power may be found in the line descriptive of the hen-pecked man's condition-- Tous ses cinq sens lui fault retraire. while his attacks on the nobility are almost up to the level of Burns-- Noblesse enrichie Richesse ennoblie Tiennent leurs estatz, Qui n'a noble vie Je vous certifie Noble n'est pas. [Sidenote: Roger de Collerye.] [Sidenote: Minor Predecessors of Marot.] Roger de Collerye[167] was a Burgundian, living at the famous and vinous town of Auxerre, and he has celebrated his loves, his distress, his amiable tendency to conviviality, in many rondeaux and other poems, sometimes attaining a very high level of excellence. 'Je suis Bon-temps, vous le voyez' is the second line of one of his irregular ballades, and the nickname expresses his general attitude well enough. Mediaeval legacies of allegory, however, supply him with more unpleasant personages, Faute d'Argent and Plate-Bourse, for his song, and his mistress, Gilleberte de Beaurepaire, appears to have been anything but continuously kind. Collerye has less perhaps of the _rhetoriqueur_ flavour than any poet of this time before Marot, and his verse is very frequently remarkable for directness and grace of diction. But like most verse of the kind it frequently drops into a conventionality less wearisome but not much less definite than that of the mere allegorisers. Jehan Bouchet[168], a lawyer of Poitiers (not to be confounded with Guillaume Bouchet, author of the _Serees_), imitated the _rhetoriqueurs_ for the most part in form, and surpassed them in length, excelling indeed in this respect even the long-winded and long-lived poets of the close of the fourteenth century. Bouchet is said to have composed a hundred thousand verses, and even M. d'Hericault avers that he read two-thirds of the number without discovering more than six quotable lines. Such works of Bouchet as we have examined fully confirm the statement. Still, he was an authority in his way, and had something of a reputation. His fanciful _nom de plume_ 'Le Traverseur des Voies Perilleuses' is the most picturesque thing he produced, and is not uncharacteristic of the later middle age tradition. Rabelais himself, who was a fair critic of poetry when his friends were not concerned, but who was no poet, and was even strikingly deficient in some of the