Christine did not escape calumny. The warmth of her amatory verses, which excited the suspicions of Horace Walpole, exposed her also to disgraceful insinuations from her contemporaries. She complained bitterly of these slanders, and solemnly protested her innocence. She had no time for intrigues. She did not speak in her own person; the warmth of sentiment in her lays and ballads was purely dramatic, and an imaginative assumption. "When people speak evil of me," she says, "sometimes I am vexed, and sometimes I only smile and say to myself, The gods, and he and I, know that there is no truth in it.'” Apart from the impassioned tone of her love songs, which was simply that of the period, there is not a tittle of evidence against the lady's reputation. Her detractors found support for their slanders in the brave show that, womanlike, she kept up when her fortunes were at their lowest ebb. Even when reduced to the necessity of borrowing money, she never relaxed in her determination to keep up appearances, and carefully concealed her poverty from the world. Her repast was often sober, she says, as became a widow, and under her mantle of grey fur and her gown of scarlet, not often renewed but well preserved, she was often sick at heart; and she had bad nights on her bed, though it was handsome and stately; but there was nothing in her face or her habit to show the world the burden of her troubles.

A hard struggle Christine seems to have had. The income of authorship was very precarious in those days. A copyist had a more certain livelihood. Once an author had parted with his manuscript, copies might be multiplied to any degree without his consent. He was not consulted, and he was not paid; the copyright belonged to the owner of the manuscript. There was no great demand for original works. An author's only chance of obtaining remuneration for his labours was to present his work to a powerful patron No. 316-VOL. LIII.

with a flattering dedication, leaving it to the patron to make such a return as his generosity dictated. The fulsomeness of dedications, highly peppered to please a patron and enlist vanity on the side of generosity, is often denounced by modern writers, who are perhaps not much more scrupulous in their appeals to the great modern patron, the public. The author of the fifteenth century was probably as conscientiously persuaded of the virtues of his patron as the author of the nineteenth century is of the virtues of his. When Christine de Pisan resolved to support herself and her family by authorship, she had peculiar difficulties in her search for a patron. The patronage of literature was indeed already established as a thing becoming the high station of a prince. Charles the Fifth had done much to encourage a healthy rivalry in this matter among the princes of Europe. But the distracted reign of his successor was a bad time for the literary aspirant in France. Why Christine persisted in clinging to her adopted country at such a time, and steadily refused the tempting offers of the Duke of Milan and the King of England, is not clear. The secret of her attachment to Paris must remain one of the mysteries of her life. It may simply have been that all her friends were there; and that as a sensible womaa she doubted the permanence of the favour of patrons in every country, even if she could depend upon the permanence of their power. Anyhow, she remained in France, and addressed herself to one after another of the factious chiefs, by whose struggles for prominence the unhappy kingdom was

torn.

She flattered them all in her dedications-the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Burgundy, the Duke of Berry, Isabella of Bavaria, the queen—but she did not attach herself to any party, and she maintained a lofty tone both in morality and in politics. There was nothing base in her

T

flattery. She credited the objects of it with virtues that they did not possess, but the virtues were such as they would have been much the better for possessing. Praise for any quality

that was really virtuous, even though the recipient of the praise did not deserve it, was a wholesome influence in a generation when the corruption of the chivalrous ideal had reached its worst, when courtly magnificence of living was disgraced by shameless orgies, and public honours were sought by the vilest intrigues and the most treacherous assassinations.

One of Christine's first works was a collection of chivalrous precepts thrown into the form of a letter sent by the goddess Othea to Hector of Troy at the age of fifteen. Othea is a personification of Wisdom, and she tells the boy, in a succession of maxims in verse, each followed by explanations and exemplifications in prose, after the manner of the Cato Major, what he must do, and what he must avoid, in order to become a perfect knight. It was dedicated to the Duke of Orleans, whose faction was in the ascendant at the close of the fourteenth century. The Duchess of Orleans, Valentine Visconti, was a countrywoman of Christine's, and this may possibly have influenced her first choice of a patron. There is, unfortunately, no reason to believe that the excellent precepts of this treatise had any effect on the Duke himself. The paramour of Isabella was probably too far gone in unknightliness to be reclaimed by precepts. But it is possible to believe that the epistle of Othea was not without an influence on the character of one of the brightest mirrors of chivalry, Dunois, the bastard of Orleans, whom Valentine with rare generosity educated, and who had already before her death given proof of his truly chivalrous spirit. Valentine's reputation stands out fair and spotless from the dark background of that profligate and intriguing court. After the assassination of her husband, and her fruitless attempts to

have justice done upon his murderer, she lamented that she must look for redress in the future to Dunois rather than to any of her own sons. The exhortations of Christine may have found a suitable soil in his gallant spirit.

But Christine was indebted also to the House of Burgundy, from which came the unfair blow that laid her first patron prostrate. A few years after she began authorship, in 1403, she sent her treatise on the Mutation of Fortune as a new year's gift to Philip the Hardy, who was for the time at the head of affairs in Paris. Philip sent her a munificent present in return, commissioned her to write the work by which she is best known, the Life of Charles the Fifth,' and placed documents at her disposal. He died three months afterwards, before Christine, rapid writer as she was, had finished the first part of her work. M. Petitot remarks with justice on this instance of Christine's extraordinary facility in writing. The book was ordered in the month of January. The first part was completed on the twenty-eighth of April. It is true that a large proportion of the work consists of general reflections and historical comparisons for which no research was required, and that the method followed allowed the writer to put down her facts as fast as she acquired them. Still, even this first part contains many details about the management of the royal household, and the administration of justice and finance that could not have been obtained without vigorous study of documents. The whole manuscript was completed on the first of November, and is certainly a remarkable achievement of rapid study and composition.

The completed work was presented to the Duc de Berry, but John of Burgundy also patronised the indefatigable authoress, and the Register of the Chamber of Accounts contains several entries of donations made to the widow of Etienne du

Castel for books presented to him. Her life became more difficult after 1405, when the struggle between Burgundy and Orleans waxed hotter. We find her in the October of that year writing till past midnight to finish a plourable requeste des loyaulx Francoys to the queen, a touching appeal to Isabella of Bavaria to remember the danger to the realm incurred by these dissensions. Again and again in the course of the next ten years she addressed similar appeals to the royal family and the leaders of the factions. She was the mouthpiece of the moderate party in the state, and her writings give a vivid idea of the horror and shame with which they looked on helplessly while the kingdom was being torn in pieces. After the battle of Agincourt, which verified her gloomiest anticipations, Christine dis

appeared into a convent, and nothing reached the public from her pen till she was able, in 1429, to celebrate the triumphs of Joan of Arc.

The life of this first champion of her sex, so denominated by herself, and thoroughly worthy of the title, would furnish occasion for a complete picture of the position of women in the Middle Ages. The various mediaval conceptions of woman as she is and woman as she ought to be are shown in Christine's writings in full argumentative conflict; and practical illustrations of the best and the worst are to be found in plenty in the court of Charles the Sixth. Christine herself is cast after the noblest type of medieval womanhood, and a certain stage of feudal society is mirrored in her works as it is nowhere else.

W. MINTO.