Fauchet unfortunately was not a good writer. This cannot be said of his principal rival, or rather successor, Etienne Pasquier. Pasquier was born at Paris in 1529, and early devoted himself to legal studies, which he pursued all through his life. His most famous performance as an advocate was his speech for the University of Paris against the Jesuits in 1565. He afterwards took a vigorous part in the Royalist polemic against the League. He did not die till 1615. His works, as yet unpublished in a complete form, are in modern times accessible chiefly in the selection of M. Leon Feugere[212]. They are voluminous, but by far the most important (with the exception perhaps of the valuable _Letters_) is the _Recherches de la France_. This is a somewhat desultory but very interesting collection of remarks on politics, history, social changes, and last, not least, literature. To us the most attractive part of Pasquier's literary history is the account he gives of the great poetical and literary movement of his own day, the revolution of the Pleiade, or, as he describes it picturesquely, 'De la Grande Flotte de Poetes que produisit le Regne du Roi Henry Deuxieme.' But his notes on the previous history of literature in France, though necessarily based on somewhat imperfect knowledge, are full of interest, and not destitute of instruction, such, for instance, as his chapters on the farce of _Pathelin_, on Provencal poetry, on the formal measures of the fourteenth century, etc. Pasquier's style is very delightful. Despite his erudition, and even what may be called his Ronsardising, he does not aim at the new severity and classicism. But his manner is exceedingly picturesque, perfectly clear, and distinguished by a sort of gossiping ingenuousness without any lack of dignity, the secret of which the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in France and England seem to have possessed and carried off with them. [Sidenote: Henri Estienne.] The third of three not dissimilar names is that of Henri Estienne. His remarkable _Apologie pour Herodote_, like not a few other works of the same kind, would be less remarkable if it were stripped of borrowed plumes; but his three treatises on French linguistics, the _Traite de la Conformite du Francais avec le Grec_, the _Precellence de la Langue Francaise_, and the _Nouveaux Dialogues de Langage Francais Italianise_, would give him a considerable place in the history of French literature if he had written no _Apologie_ and published no _Thesaurus_. All three works are more or less directed against the Italianising mania of the day. [Sidenote: Herberay.]