Note 147 — GEOFROY TORY

This most necessary reform spread very rapidly. The year had not ended when another Paris printer, Antoine Augereau, published a small treatise on the subject, entitled: Briefve doctrine pour deuement escripre selon la proprieté du langaige françoys. ['Brief instructions for writing the French language properly.'] This curious work, which is printed with the Miroir de très chrestienne princesse Marguerite de France, in an octavo volume, 1533, informs us among other things that the final E which requires the acute accent was at that time called masculine, and that the word feminine was applied to it when it did not take the accent. These are, as we see, the terms used by Tory. Hence doubtless the term féminine, which is still applied to-day, in French poetry, to silent rhymes. (See Appendix V.)