characteristics of the poet, admired and emulated Bouchet in heavy verse; and a numerously attended school, hardly any of the pupils being worth individual mention, gathered round the lawyer. Charles de Bordigne is only remarkable for having, in his _Legende de Pierre Faifeu_, united the _rhetoriqueur_ style with a kind of Villonesque or rather pseudo-Villonesque subject. The title of the chief poems of Symphorien Champier, _Le Nef des Dames Amoureuses_, sufficiently indicates his style. But Champier, though by no means a good poet, was a useful and studious man of letters, and did much to form the literary _cenacle_ which gathered at Lyons in the second quarter of the century, and which, both in original composition, in translations of the classics, and in scholarly publication of work both ancient and modern, rendered invaluable service to literature. Gratien du Pont[169] continued the now very stale mediaeval calumnies on women in his _Controverses des Sexes Masculin et Feminin_. Eloy d'Amerval, a Picard priest, also fell into mediaeval lines in his _Livre de la Deablerie_, in which the personages of Lucifer and Satan are made the mouthpieces of much social satire. Jean Parmentier, a sailor and a poet, combined his two professions in _Les Merveilles de Dieu_, a poem including some powerful verse. A vigorous ballade, with the refrain _Car France est Cymetiereaux Anglois_, has preserved the name of Pierre Vachot. But the remaining poets of this time could only find a place in a very extended literary history. Most of them, in the words of one of their number, took continual lessons _es oeuvres Cretiniques et Bouchetiques_, and some of them succeeded at last in imitating the dulness of Bouchet and the preposterous mannerisms of Cretin. Perhaps no equal period in all early French history produced more and at the same time worse verse than the reign of Louis XII. Fortunately, however, a true poet, if one of some limitations, took up the tradition, and showed what it could do. Marot has sometimes been regarded as the father of modern French poetry, which, unless modern French poetry is limited to La Fontaine and the poets of the eighteenth century, is absolutely false. He is sometimes regarded as the last of mediaeval poets, which, though truer, is false likewise. What he really was can be shown without much difficulty. [Sidenote: Clement Marot.]