[115] A very early example of the special sense given to this word in French increasingly during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, of "freethinker" deepening to "atheist." Johnson's friend, it will be remembered, regarded Philosophy as something to which the irruption of Cheerfulness was fatal; Butler, as something acquirable by reading Alexander Ross; a famous ancient saying, as the remembrancer of death; and a modern usage, as something which has brass and glass "instruments." But it was Hegel, was it not? or Carlyle? who summarised the French view and its time of prevalence in the phrase, "When every one was a philosopher who did not believe in the Devil."
[116] His translations of the Andria and of Plato's Lysis; and his verses, the chief charm of which is to be found in his adoption of the "cut and broken" stanzas which the French Renaissance loved.
[117] Not to be confused with Jehan Bouchet the poet, a much older man, indeed some twenty years older than Rabelais, and as dull as Raminagrobis Crétin himself, but the inventor or discoverer of that agreeable agnomen "Traverseur des Voies Périlleuses" which has been noted above.
[118] Cholières, I think, deserves the prize for sinking lowest.
[119] From all the endless welter of abuse of God's great gift of speech [and writing] about the French Revolution, perhaps nothing has emerged more clearly than that its evils were mainly due to the sterilisation of the regular Provincial assemblies under the later monarchy.
[120] A person not bad of blood will always be glad to mention one of the few good sides of a generally detestable character; and a person of humour must always chuckle at some of the ways in which Calvin's services to French prose were utilised.
[121] He did not confine his good offices to romances of caballería. In 1539 he turned into French the Arnalte and Lucenda of Diego de San Pedro (author of the more widely known Carcel de Amor), a very curious if also rather tedious-brief love-story which had great influence in France (see Reynier, op. cit. inf. pp. 66-73). This (though M. Reynier did not know it) was afterwards versified in English by one of our minor Carolines, and will appear in the third volume of the collected edition of them now in course of publication by the Clarendon Press.
[122] Not always. Nouzhatoul-aouadat is certainly not as musical as Pintiquinestra, though Nouronnihar as certainly is.
Note on Hélisenne de Crenne.