statecraft, and his book has long ranked with that of Machiavelli as a manual of the art, though he has not the absolutely non-moral character of the Italian. His memoirs, considered merely as literature, show a style well suited to their purport,--not, indeed, brilliant or picturesque, but clear, terse and thoroughly well suited to the expression of the acuteness, observation and common sense of their author. The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. Antoine de la Salle. Influence of the Renaissance. But prose was not content with the domain of serious literature. It had already long possessed a respectable position as a vehicle of romance, and the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries were pre-eminently the time when the epics of chivalry were re-edited and extended in prose. Few, however, of these extensions offer much literary interest. On the other hand, the best prose of the century, and almost the earliest which deserves the title of a satisfactory literary medium, was employed for the telling of romances in miniature. The _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ is undoubtedly the first work of prose belles-lettres in French, and the first, moreover, of a long and most remarkable class of literary work in which French writers may challenge all comers with the certainty of victory--the short prose tale of a comic character. This remarkable work has usually been attributed, like the somewhat similar but later _Heptameron_, to a knot of literary courtiers gathered round a royal personage, in this case the dauphin Louis, afterwards Louis XI. Some evidence has recently been produced which seems to show that this tradition, which attributed some of the tales to Louis himself, is erroneous, but the question is still undecided. The subjects of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ are by no means new. They are simply the old themes of the fabliaux treated in the old way. The novelty is in the application of prose to such a purpose, and in the crispness, the fluency and the elegance of the prose used. The fortunate author or editor to whom these admirable tales have of late been attributed is Antoine de la Salle (1398-1461), who, if this attribution and certain others be correct, must be allowed to be one of the most original and fertile authors of early French literature. La Salle's one acknowledged work is the story of _Petit Jehan de Saintre_, a short romance exhibiting great command of character and abundance of delicate draughtsmanship. To this not only the authorship, part-authorship or editorship of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ has been added; but the still more famous and important work of _L'Avocat Patelin_ has been assigned by respectable, though of course conjecturing, authority to the same paternity. The generosity of critics towards La Salle has not even stopped here. A fourth masterpiece of the period, _Les Quinze Joies de mariage_, has also been assigned to him. This last work, like the other three, is satirical in subject, and shows