SATIRE causes pain, but it is not so bad as bombshells-the latter cracking literal pates, while the other explodes in reluctant peals of laughter and sardonic literary grins. The sheer harmlessness of this savage satiric warfare was no slight merit in the age which witnessed the ruthless wars of the Reformation: the origin of the Jesuits; the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; the murders by the Leaguers; and the Assassination of Henry IV. It was something to fight with pens instead of rapiersto substitute ink for human bloodthe blaze of genius more or less brilliant for the baleful fires of the Inquisition. Satire besides promoted truth, and has actually contributed in no slight degree to win us the scientific and religious truth under whose grateful shade we rest at the present day, while the tendency and aim of force is to crush and suppress truth, and chain it down in unrighteousness. In looking with complacency on satire, we do so with some reason to show for our approval, and if from the abstract thing itself we turn our gaze upon the pages of the documents penned by the satiric muse shortly to pass under our review, we shall find no reason moral or social grounds to recall our verdict in their favour. "Pantagruel" is a name the world will not willingly let die, a work of unquestionable genius, although of extraordinary grotesqueness and

VOL. LXXI.-NO. CCCCXXI.

on

coarseness. The "Mystery of Iniquity," by Duplessis Mornay, has not lost its interest as a memorial of a controversy. The "Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum" is a repertory of the broadest immortal fun. The" Satire Menippée" will never be out of date, as illustrative of the politicians of the League; and the "Apology for Herodotus" will remain for ever to justify Protestant incredulity of monstrous medieval legend and miracle. The world's store of provocatives of honest mirth has been largely increased by productions of the class of which we treat, and now we have them we could better spare-better things. We need stimulants no less than solid fare, and these appetizing records of bloodless tilt and tournament; these volumes of infinite jest that in their day could put the table in a roar; these hearty guffaws from lungs long returned to dust, echoes of ha ha's from the region d'outre tombe; titillate our appetite, jaded ever so little with our perpetual hash of science with all its 'ologies, and act like the salutary dinner pill or cayenne whet on our masticatory apparatus.

Our review of some of the controversial literature of the sixteenth century must be regarded as undertaken far more in the interest of bibliography or literary history than in those of hostile Churches and warring dogmas. Of course we have opinions of our own on both

1*

these topics, but the pages of MAGA are not the place for their discussion; and we look upon the controversies then conducted and their mode of conduct as pretty nearly dead things, whose function is past and gone-not worthy to be revived in our day, and mischievous if they could be revived. A curious proof of the utter lack of vitality in the polemics of the sixteenth century is furnished in the dead failure of the Parker Society, which could reprint the heavy volumes and scarce less heavy pamphlets of our English Reformation period, but could find few purchasers and no

"

readers.

Another incidental proof has turned up but the other day (July 1, 1867) in the record of a sale of Sir Thomas Gage's books by Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, when Richeome's "Idolatrie Huguenote was sold amongst other volumes, and singly produced £13-very decided evidence that the literature to which it belongs is relegated into the class of Libri rarissimi. In that class, in the name of charity, let that work and its kindred works remain, while we simply and with utterly unpolemic purpose recall the titles of a few of these and of the theological quarrels in which they arose, in order to bid them farewell for ever things that it is well to know, but by no means needful to remember! We draw our notes from sufficiently obvious sources, and have no reluctance to confess our obligations to a more severe industry than our own.

There was abundant use of satire in other departments of science in the stirring period of the Reformation; but of all the kinds of satire with which the sixteenth century was rife, that of the theologians was the worst, as might be expected from the fierce strife of Churches and theologies which raged at that period, which knew no measure, which respected no creeds, which spared no man. That century witnessed the struggles into life of the Churches of the Reformation, and the last sigh of the liberties of the national Church of France. In vain was a sage tradition and law in favour of the Gallic Church; pleasure-loving kings grasped the gift of bestowing its benefices on the ministers of their pleasures, the

revels; and

minions of their Popes claimed all spiritual power, together with the annates or first year's revenue of all benefices. Popular election of the clergy was known no more-synodal action on the part of the clerisy reduced to a form, and the Church lay bleeding and exhausted-despoiled and enslaved by means of the usurpations and robberies of the civil power in complicity with the Holy See. Indignation filled many an honest heart and burst into verse of the following character, pasted, like pasquinades, here and there through the capital:"Papa Leo, Mulier: frendens Leo rodit utrumque.

Papa Leo, Mulier sulphuris antra petant.

Papa Leo, consorte carent, Mulierque marito

Conjugio hos jungas, Cerberus alter erunt."

"Three evil things-Pope, Minister, and Crown,

Conspire to keep our French religion down:

Three evil things-the Pope, the worst of evils

All speeding post-haste to the realm of devils.

Mix three in one, each worthy of his mate,

A second Cerberus to scare the comers

to hell-gate."

The three detested notables were Leo X., the Chancellor Duprat, and the Queen mother Louisa of Savoy.

The people mourned the abridgment or loss of their spiritual liberties, and recalled Fleury's description of the rights of the laity in the apostolic Churches. "All persons," said that candid and learned historian, "ought to have a share in electing the officer whom all are required to obey; and all ought to be acquainted beforehand with him whom they are called on to elect. Such was the practice of the Church in the in the early ages." The people poured forth their complaints in sarcastic rhymes:

"Well may priest, and well may curé
Beat their breast with grief and fury;
Minions now their cures inherit,
Barr'd the way to worth and merit.
Once, in days past recollection,
The Holy Ghost assum'd th' election
Of those who at his altars waited-
Wisely and well the Church then
mated.

Now those in power their trust betray!
And lewdly give her hand away
To hirelings greedy of their pay.
Better the choice were made by dice,

Some virtue then might chequer vice." France saw with dismay its pragmatic sanction repealed, with all its securities for the maintenance of their independent religious institutions, and the mutilated Concordat established in its stead; the changeling foisted in the place of the legitimate offspring by the jugglery of Pope and King. The discontent such measures awakened induced many of the more thoughtful minds in France to look with favour on the movement begun in Germany on behalf of the Reformation. The year 1515, when Francis I. formally abolished the greater defences of the Gallican Church, and shut it up within the narrower and weaker lines of the astute Leo's Concordat, was not long prior to the date of Tetzel's discomfiture, and the theses of Wittemberg. But while some hiled Luther's work as a remedial one, tending to the restored health of the afflicted Church, others-the timid and bigoted-regarded the man as an incarnation of evil, and his evolution as a revolution and subversion of all that was good. Hence battles grew both with the sword and with the pen; but our business is with those of the pen exclusively in our present review.

The Bible was the fountain of the Reformation, the glory of the Reformers, and the detestation of the Roman Catholic priesthood. The laity were systematically denied its perusal in any tongue save the Latin, and even there its perusal was frowned upon by the clergy. Henry Stephen, in his "Apology for Herodotus," commends the fact to the notice of posterity, that thirty years before he wrote, a man had to hide himself in order to read the Bible, just as one would hide himself to coin false money. The enlightened scholars of the

of both secular and biblical knowledge. Wherever reform came with its temple it erected its school, and left to the residuary priesthood their gloomy heritage of ignorance and superstition. All who had learning, all who had wisdom, all who had earnestness, all who had hearts, flocked toward the open Bible, like bees to their hive, attracted by the honeyed sweetness of the word so long denied them in every shape except in that of the Latin Gospels, and the rare and jejune homily from the pulpit. The hunger of the soul was satisfied with the divine repast of Holy Writ as it never had been before; and the men refreshed thereby were not to be deterred from their spiritual food by denunciation or peril of life. In vain the Sorbonne thundered its fulminations against the professors of the new creed-in vain Bouchart insisted upon the virtue of fire and fagot in curing of heresy-in_vain the principal of Montaigu, Beda, burned the "Paraphrases, of Erasmus," and the Looking-glass of the Sinful Soul,"-in vain the President of the Parliament, Lizet, seconded the blind efforts of the doctor's zeal. The tide of invasion pressed on despite of the resistance of these modern Cocles, who hated Virgil and Cicero almost as cordially as they hated Calvin and Favel, and forced them back into their citadel of prescription, hurling their menaces against Budé and scholarship as heartily as

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66 Adversus Clandestinos Lutheranos." The warfare of the high soon found its way amongst the low, and placard and pasquinade followed on the side of libel and prescription. Statues of the Virgin breathed threatenings and slaughters against the heretics in these terms:

"Pile high, pile high, the fagots dry
For those who flout Our Lady's ma-
jesty;

Thou, Paris fair, redeem thy name-
Consign the heretics to flame."

Deep pools, deep pools, to duck the fools

Who, loving darkness, hate the schools; Who only aim to argue well,

And care not God's own truth to tell.”

This quatrain was commonly as

cribed to Marot. But fire carried the day over water; and in 1529 Berquin was burned at the stake for libelling the Virgin in his books; and in 1534 the war of extirpation began.

Marot, a sharpshooter, fled into exile. At Ferrara and Venice he penned those sacred idylls which partook of the phraseology of Paganism, while they conveyed Christian ideas-a strange medley, only redeemed from profanity by the religious purpose that informed them. The harp of the prophets was an instrument too majestic for his weak hand, wherefore it was perpetually giving way to the pipe of Theocritus and Virgil, that suited his genius better. There is a singular flavour of Paganism in the address of the Christian Shepherd couched in these

terms:

The same lewd goddess that bewitched

old Greece

Enthrals new Rome from greatest to the

least.

That Queen of whoredoms rules all hearts, and leads,

Won by her sorceries, all crowned heads;

Earth's proudest, grandest, coronetted knaves,

Drunk with her fornication, are her slaves."

Marot's bolt was

soon shot-his race early run. He died in exile in the year 1544.

Robert Etienne's satires were even more stinging than Marot's, marked by a deeper scholarship, and exhibiting indisputable facts rather than heady arguments. His printing-press became a formidable battering-ram against the walls of the Roman Church, and at an early period was denounced by the ecclesiastics as a weapon of seditious heresy. The protection of the kings of France was insufficient for his safety, and he betook himself to Switzerland with his Dolét was a warning-their pile family. The fate of Berquin and blazed for ever before his eyes--and the counsel of both wisdom and natural fear was flight. His chief fault in the eyes of theologians had been that he printed a Bible with comments, these latter inspired, they said, by Calvin. A sample of the censures of these lynx-eyed critics, exposed in a burning pamphlet, will show how futile and how frivolous the objections of the censors were, and how difficult it must be for a Roman Catholic writer of independent views to publish without offence in a Roman Catholic country. The annotations in the Commentary were dealt with as follows:

"Annotation. We have God alone for our refuge.

"Censure. This annotation is Lutheran, turning Christians away from seeking succour of the Blessed Virgin and the saints.

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Annotation. Job charges God with laying upon him the weight of

his cross.