_16th-Century Poetry._--The first few years of the 16th century were naturally occupied rather with the last developments of the medieval forms than with the production of the new model. The clerks of the Bazoche and the Confraternity of the Passion still produced and acted mysteries, moralities and farces. The poets of the "Grands Rhetoriqueurs" school still wrote elaborate allegorical poetry. Chansons de geste, rhymed romances and fabliaux had long ceased to be written. But the press was multiplying the contents of the former in the prose form which they had finally assumed, and in the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ there already existed admirable specimens of the short prose tale. There even were signs, as in some writers already mentioned and in Roger de Collerye, a lackpenny but light-hearted singer of the early part of the century, of definite enfranchisement in verse. But the first note of the new literature was sounded by Clement Marot (1496/7-1544). The son of an elder poet, Jehan des Mares called Marot (1463-1523), Clement at first wrote, like his father's contemporaries, allegorical and mythological poetry, afterwards collected in a volume with a charming title, _L'Adolescence clementine_. It was not till he was nearly thirty years old that his work became really remarkable. From that time forward till his death, about twenty years afterwards, he was much involved in the troubles and persecutions of the Huguenot party to which he belonged; nor was the protection of Marguerite d'Angouleme, the chief patroness of Huguenots and men of letters, always efficient. But his troubles, so far from harming, helped his literary faculties; and his epistles, epigrams, _blasons_ (descendants of the medieval _dits_), and _coq-a-l'ane_ became remarkable for their easy and polished style, their light and graceful wit, and a certain elegance which had not as yet been even attempted in any modern tongue, though the Italian humanists had not been far from it in some of their Latin compositions. Around Marot arose a whole school of disciples and imitators, such as Victor Brodeau (1470?-1540), the great authority on rondeaux, Maurice Sceve, a fertile author of blasons, Salel, Marguerite herself (1492-1549), of whom more hereafter, and Mellin de Saint Gelais (1491-1558). The last, son of the bishop named above, is a courtly writer of occasional pieces, who sustained as well as he could the _style marotique_ against Ronsard, and who has the credit of introducing the regular sonnet into French. But the inventive vigour of the age was so great that one school had hardly become popular before another pushed it from its stool, and even of the Marotists just mentioned Sceve and Salel are often regarded as chief and member respectively of a Lyonnese coterie, intermediate between the schools of Marot and of Ronsard, containing other members of repute such as Antoine Heroet and Charles Fontaine and claiming Louise Labe (_v. inf._) herself. Pierre de Ronsard