François Villon wrote during the latter half of the fifteenth century, and is principally known by his ballads, which were something quite new to French literature, and have, one may venture to say, remained unique therein. From the old artificial romances and allegories he breaks clean away. He is as original and independent as our poet Burns, whom, by the way, he somewhat resembled in personal character. His merit, like that of the Greeks whom he did not know, lies in his truth, in the candid expression of his own personal emotions, in his naive confessions, in his sincere pathos. We all sympathize with emotions and confessions of this nature, and therefore Villon, like Burns, possesses a permanent and a universal value. And not only is he true in sentiment, he is clear and direct in his phrase, and musical in his verse. Clément Marot opens the sixteenth century. He has been called the father of modern French poetry. If this means that he wrote with an ease and sprightliness, and a vein of urbane satire, which are usually associated with the _esprit gaulois_, but which skim rather along the surface of things, it is true. But if it means that he is the consummation of the Renaissance, and that the critical principles of French poetry were established in his time, it is without truth. For Marot, like Villon, is a poet and an artist without following the despotic rules which afterwards came to prevail in France, and he furthermore sought his themes rather in the old French subjects, the romances and the _fabliaux_, than in realms of classical antiquity. The Italian influence, however, touches him and leads him into pastorals, which, we must note, were known to Spenser. Villon and Marot are both of the transition period, and not wholly of the Renaissance. They both fell short in one great respect; they lacked depth and elevation. This is a vice to which all French verse is prone, setting, as it does, so special a value on form; but it was the more discoverable in these two poets, because the rich intellectual nutriment of antiquity had not yet been assimilated by them, because their minds laboured under the intellectual poverty of mediaevalism, because, in other words, they lacked the substance with which the best ancient literature is crammed. Their poetry has many blossoms, but bears little fruit. Yet they mark one great step in progress. They are emancipated from the old mediaeval artificiality. While Villon and Marot were thus emancipated, there were others during this transition time who were not by any means so. On the one hand they allegorized, like the trouvères, to the utmost; their subjects were obsolete and unreal; on the other, their language was trivial and their contents uneven. Verse literature seemed to need bracing and correction in the light of advancing study of the Greek and Latin masterpieces, and it is to the administering of such correction that we come in what is known as the _Pléiade_.