But no one at once appeared to make VILLON'S example fruitful for the development of lyric verse, and it went on its way of formal refinement at the hands of the industrious school of rhetoricians, becoming more and more dry and empty, more and more a matter of intricate mechanism and ornament. No more signal proof of the sterility of the school could be imagined than the triumphs of the art of some of the grands _rhétoriqueurs_ like MESCHINOT (1415?-1491), or MOLINET (d. 1507), the recognized leader of his day. The last expiring effort of this essentially mediaeval lyric is seen in CLÉMENT MAROT. He had already begun to catch the glow of the dawn of the Renaissance, but he was rooted in the soil of the middle ages and his real masters were his immediate predecessors. He avoided their absurdities of alliteration and redundant rhyme and their pedantry; but he appropriated the results of their efforts at perfecting the verse structure and adhered to the traditional forms. The great stores of the ancient literatures that were thrown open to France in the course of the first half of the sixteenth century came too late to be the main substance of MAROT'S culture. But it was far otherwise with the next generation. It was nurtured on the literatures of Greece, Rome, and Italy, which was also a classical land for the France of that day; and it was almost beside itself with enthusiasm for them. The traditions of the mediaeval lyric and all its fixed forms were swept away with one breath as barbarous rubbish by the proclamations of the young admirers of antiquity. The manifesto of the new movement, the _Défense et Illustration de la langue française_ by JOACHIM DU BELLAY, bade the poet "leave to the Floral Games of Toulouse and to the _puis_ of Rouen all those old French verses, such as _Rondeaux_, _Ballades_, _Virelais_, _Chants royaux_, _Chansons_, and other like vulgar trifles," and apply himself to rivaling the ancients in epigrams, elegies, odes, satires, epistles, eclogues, and the Italians in sonnets. But the transformation which this movement effected for the lyric did not come from the substitution of different forms as models. It had a deeper source.