variant of _Dolopathos_, received repeated treatment from French writers both in prose and verse. The odd notion of an _Ovide moralise_ used to be ascribed to Philippe de Vitry, bishop of Meaux (1291?-1391?), a person complimented by Petrarch, but is now assigned to a certain Chretien Legonais. Art, too, soon demanded exposition in verse, as well as science. The favourite pastime of the chase was repeatedly dealt with, notably in the _Roi Modus_ (1325), mixed prose and verse; the _Deduits de la chasse_ (1387), of Gaston de Foix, prose; and the _Tresor de Venerie_ of Hardouin (1394), verse. Very soon didactic verse extended itself to all the arts and sciences. Vegetius and his military precepts had found a home in French octosyllables as early as the 12th century; the end of the same age saw the ceremonies of knighthood solemnly versified, and _napes_ (maps) _du monde_ also soon appeared. At last, in 1245, Gautier of Metz translated from various Latin works into French verse a sort of encyclopaedia, while another, incongruous but known as _L'Image du monde_, exists from the same century. Profane knowledge was not the only subject which exercised didactic poets at this time. Religious handbooks and commentaries on the scriptures were common in the 13th and following centuries, and, under the title of _Castoiements, Enseignements_ and _Doctrinaux_, moral treatises became common. The most famous of these, the _Castoiement d'un pere a son fils_, falls under the class, already mentioned, of works due to oriental influence, being derived from the Indian _Panchatantra_. In the 14th century the influence of the _Roman de la rose_ helped to render moral verse frequent and popular. The same century, moreover, which witnessed these developments of well-intentioned if not always judicious erudition witnessed also a considerable change in lyrical poetry. Hitherto such poetry had chiefly been composed in the melodious but unconstrained forms of the romance and the pastourelle. In the 14th century the writers of northern France subjected themselves to severer rules. In this age arose the forms which for so long a time were to occupy French singers,--the ballade, the rondeau, the rondel, the triolet, the chant royal and others. These received considerable alterations as time went on. We possess not a few _Artes poeticae_, such as that of Eustache Deschamps at the end of the 14th century, that formerly ascribed to Henri de Croy and now to Molinet at the end of the 15th, and that of Thomas Sibilet in the 16th, giving particulars of them, and these particulars show considerable changes. Thus the term rondeau, which since Villon has been chiefly limited to a poem of 15 lines, where the 9th and 15th repeat the first words of the first, was originally applied both to the rondel, a poem of 13 or 14 lines, where the first two are twice repeated integrally, and to the triolet, one of 8 only, where the first line occurs three times and the second twice. The last is an