CHRESTIEN, Florent (1541-1596), a satirist and Latin poet, was the son of Guillaume Chrestien, an eminent French physician and writer on physiology, and was born at Orleans. A pupil of Henri Estienne, the famous Hellenist, and a zealous Calvinist, at an early age he was appointed tutor to Henry of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV., who made him his librarian. De Thou says of Chrestien that he was an excellent man, a man of such an enlightened and neble soul that he was incapable of writing aught from a base and servile complaisance, but that it was not safe to irritate his Calvinism, as if that were done he hit hard and straight, trusting to reconciliation afterwards. Florent Chrestien was the author of many good translations from the Greek into Latin verse,—amongst others, of versions of the Hero and Leander attributed to Musaeus, of several plays, and of many epigrams from the Anthology, all of which were enriched with excellent notes and commentaries. In his translations into French, among which are remarked those of Buchanan’s Jephtkxs and of Oppian De Venatione, he is not so happy, being rather to be praised for fidelity to his original than for excellence of style. He wrote in verse against Ronsard, and in prose against Pibrac, the apologist of the Saint-Bartholomew; but his principal claim to a place among memorable satirists is as one of the authors of the Satyre Menippee, the famous pasquinade in the interest of his old pupil, Henry ΓV., his share in which, however, cannot now be exactly determined.

CHRESTIEN DE TROYES, the most eminent of the early French writers of romance, was born at Troyes in Champagne in the 11th century. Nothing whatever is known of his life; but from the fact that several of his works are dedicated to Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, it is conjectured that he was attached to the court of that prince. He was much esteemed and highly praised by his contemporaries, and by the writers of the century following, and not without reason, being a master of style, and possessing in an eminent degree the qualities of invention and conduct, together with great purity and range of thought, and a remarkable knowledge of men and manners. His books, therefore, apart from the interest attached to them as specimens of the mediaeval epic, and by reason of their relation to the rest of the Arthurian literature, and in spite of the difficulties and crudities of the unformed language in which they are written, are still readable, and are rich in instructive details concerning the age that gave them birth. Many romances are attributed to Chrestien des Troyes. Modern criticism has selected six only as undoubtedly his. These are—(1) Irec et Énide, which contains some seven thousand verses, and which has supplied the materials for one of the legends of Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle; (2) Cliges, or Cliget, a second Round Table romance; (3) Le Chevalier au Lion, containing nearly seven thousand verses, an offshoot of the Arthurian legend, if not absolutely forming part of it; (4) Guillaume d'Angleterre, a specimen of a more modem style, containing three thousand three hundred verses; (5) Le Chevalier de la Charette, a romance of nearly seven thousand verses, written by Chrestien and continued by Godefroid de Laigny, the hero of which is Lancelot du Lac; and (6) ...