Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/801

Rh wrote four hundred Latin distichs on the death of the Queen of Navarre, Margaret de Valois, which were soon after translated into Greek, French, and Italian, and printed at Paris in 1551, under the title of Tombeau de Marguerite de Valois, Reyne de Navarre. Nicholas Denisot, who had been preceptor to these three learned ladies, made a collection, containing a translation of their distichs, and some other verses, as well in honour of them, as upon the death of the Queen of Navarre, and dedicated it to Margaret de Valois, Duchess of Berri, sister of Henry II.

"I have asked," says M. Bayle, "some Englishmen of great learning, and well versed in the knowledge of books and authors, who those three illustrious English ladies were, and have told them the little I knew of them; they answered me, that they knew nothing at all of them. I have received the same answer from Paris, though I consulted persons who, in that kind of learning, have scarce any equal. These three famous ladies must be inevitably sunk into oblivion, since Mr. Juncker has not said one word of them in the Catalogue of Learned Women, which he published some time ago. He sometimes quotes Pits: since, therefore, he says nothing of these ladies, it is a good proof that Pits himself says nothing of them. A friend of mine had before assured me, that neither Bale nor Pits, who have treated so amply of the writers of that learned