whether political, antiquarian or literary. Amyot. _16th-Century Savants._--One more division, and only one, that of scientific and learned writers pure and simple, remains. Much of the work of this kind during the period was naturally done in Latin, the vulgar tongue of the learned. But in France, as in other countries, the study of the classics led to a vast number of translations, and it so happened that one of the translators deserves as a prose writer a rank among the highest. Many of the authors already mentioned contributed to the literature of translation. Des Periers translated the Platonic dialogue _Lysis_, la Boetie some works of Xenophon and Plutarch, du Vair the _De corona_, the _In Ctesiphontem_ and the _Pro Milone_. Salel attempted the _Iliad_, Belleau the false _Anacreon_, Baif some plays of Plautus and Terence. Besides these Lefevre d'Etaples gave a version of the Bible, Saliat one of Herodotus, and Louis Leroi (1510-1577), not to be confounded with the part author of the _Menippee_, many works of Plato, Aristotle and other Greek writers. But while most if not all of these translators owed the merits of their work to their originals, and deserved, much more deserve, to be read only by those to whom those originals are sealed, Jacques Amyot (1513-1593), bishop of Auxerre, takes rank as a French classic by his translations of Plutarch, Longus and Heliodorus. The admiration which Amyot excited in his own time was immense. Montaigne declares that it was thanks to him that his contemporaries knew how to speak and to write, and the Academy in the next age, though not too much inclined to honour its predecessors, ranked him as a model. His Plutarch, which had an enormous influence at the time, and coloured perhaps more than any classic the thoughts and writings of the 16th century, both in French and English, was then considered his masterpiece. Nowadays perhaps, and from the purely literary standpoint, that position would be assigned to his exquisite version of the exquisite story of Daphnis and Chloe. It is needless to say that absolute fidelity and exact scholarship are not the pre-eminent merits of these versions. They are not philological exercises, but works of art.