.

I wish to justify myself against the reproach of having left my country, to the hurt of the public weal, and of not having acknowledged the great liberality displayed towards me by the king; since it was a high honor for me that the king, having deigned to make me his printer, always kept me under his protection, in the face of all who envied me and wished me ill, and never ceased to aid me graciously in all sorts of ways." The _College Royal,_ no less than Robert Estienne, met with obstacles and ill-wishers; it was William Bude (Budeaus) who first suggested the idea of the college to the king, primarily with the limited purpose of securing instruction in Greek and Hebrew, after the fashion of the College of Young Grecians and the College of the Three Languages (the Trilingual, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin), of which the former was founded at Rome by Leo X., the latter at Louvain by Canon Jerome Busleyden.

Francis I.readily surrendered himself to more magnificent projects; he was anxious to erect a splendid building on the site of the Hotel de Nesle, and to put Erasmus at the head of the College Royal.

War incessantly renewed and the nascent religious troubles interfered with his resolutions; but William Bude never ceased to urge upon the king an extension of the branches of learning in the establishment; and after the Peace of Cambrai in 1529, chairs of mathematics, Oriental languages, Latin oratory, Greek and Latin philosophy, and medicine were successively added to the chairs of Hebrew and Greek which had been the original nucleus of instruction in the College Royal.

It continued to be an object of suspicion to the Sorbonne and of hesitation in the Parliament, to which royalty had recourse against the attacks of its adversaries.
But it had no lack of protectors, nevertheless: the Cardinal of Lorraine, Charles IX., and Catherine de' Medici herself supported it in its trials; and Francis I.had the honor of founding a great school of the higher sort of education, a school, which, throughout all the religious dissensions and all the political revolutions of France, has kept its position and independence, whatever may have been elsewhere, in the matter of public instruction, the system and the regimen of state establishments.
A few words have already been said about the development of the arts, especially architecture and sculpture, in the middle ages, and of the characteristics, original and national, Gallic and Christian, which belonged to them at this period, particularly in respect of their innumerable churches, great and small.