artificial school of French poetry since the end of the thirteenth
century in a vast number of forms.

The letters are naturally of the very first importance for determining
the character of Margaret's life as a woman of business, a diplomatist,
and so forth. They show her to us in all these capacities, and also in
that of an enlightened and always ready patroness of letters and of men
of letters. Further, they are of value, though their value is somewhat
affected by a reservation to be made immediately, as to her mental and
moral characteristics. But they are not of literary interest at all
equal to that of either of the other divisions. They are, if not spoilt,
still not improved, by the fact that the art of easy letter-writing,
in which Frenchwomen of the next century were to show themselves such
proficients, had not yet been developed, and that most of them are
couched in a heavy, laborious, semiofficial style, which smells, as far
as mere style goes, of the cumbrous refinements of the _rhétoriqueurs_,
in whose flourishing time Margaret herself grew up, and which conceals
the writer's sentiments under elaborate forms of ceremonial courtesy.
Something at least of the groundless scandal before referred to is
derived in all probability, if not in all certainty, from the lavish
use of hyperbole in addressing her brother; and generally speaking,
the rebuke of the Queen to Polonius, "More matter with less art," is
applicable to the whole correspondence.

Something of the same evil influence is shown in the Marguerites. It
must be remembered that the writer died before the Pléiade movement had
been fully started, and that she was older by five years than Marot,
the only one of her own contemporaries and her own literary circle who
attained to a poetic style easier, freer, and more genuine than the
cumbrous rhetoric, partly derived from the allegorising style of the