a tone of voice, that he at once conceived great hopes of you.” Yet the oddity and the matter are the virtues of the _Œconomies Royales_. Something equivalent must needs be said of the memoirs of Castelnau, of Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes--written by his son Jean--of Condé, of François de Guise, and many others.[105] [SN: _Bodin._] Jean Bodin (1530-1596) is a great name in political science. His _République_, first published in French in 1578 and then enlarged and translated into Latin by the author in 1586, must always remain of value, if for no other reason than because it shows how it was possible for men of the sixteenth century who were not merely servile courtiers, to believe in the “right divine” of kings and the excellence of despotism. Bodin’s influence, even among ourselves, was strong in the seventeenth century. Strafford was almost certainly thinking of him when he told the Council that the king was entitled, as representative of the State, to act _legibus solutus_; and his doctrine was taught in incomparable English by Hobbes. Yet Bodin will hardly be read for his French, and what we cannot read for the form cannot be called literature. [SN: _The great memoir-writers._] It shows, as fully as anything well could, the wealth of French prose that we can leave aside so many writers, even in what is not one of the great periods, and yet retain a considerable body of literature in the very fullest sense of the word. Montaigne, who is pre-eminent, stands by himself, alike in form and in matter, and so for other reasons does the _Satyre Ménippée_. But among the memoir-writers who also were in some cases historians, there are five who would of themselves be enough to make the wealth of any other literature in this kind--Carloix, La Noue, D’Aubigné, Monluc, and Brantôme. They came indeed in a happy hour. The generation was full of strong and violent characters, and of sudden picturesque events to supply them with matter. The language had been developed and shaped by Rabelais, Calvin, and the translators with Amyot at their head, while it had not yet been pruned by the pedantry of the seventeenth century. It still kept its colour. In history the classics and the Italians had supplied models of more capability than the chronicles which Comines had followed. For the model of the memoir, a people who could look back to Joinville and Villehardouin had no need of foreign influence. [SN: _Carloix._]