country, they straightway put an end to the already dying literature of the conquered race and substituted their own. God forbid that they should listen to the lamentations of the Anglo-Saxon mariner or traveller ! They had no concern with their miserable dirges. Long live Christ who loves the French!" Even in the laws and religion of the French there now and then appeared marks of their irrepressible entrain. Shall we not, then, find it in their stories?

The new-comers liked tales of two kinds. First, they delighted in stories of chivalry, where they found marvellous exploits differing little from their own. They had seen the son of Herleva, a tanner's daughter of Falaise, win a kingdom in a battle, in course of which the cares of a conqueror had not prevented him from making jokes. When, therefore, they wrote a romance, they might well attribute extraordinary adventures and rare courage to Roland, Arthur and Lancelot : in face of the behaviour of the bastard of Normandy, it would be difficult to tax the exploits attributed to those heroes with improbability. The numberless epic romances in which they delighted had no resemblance with the "Beowulf" of old. These stories were no longer filled with mere deeds of valour, but also with acts of courtesy; they were full of love and tenderness. Even in the more Germanic of their poems, in "Roland,' the hero is shaken by his emotions, and is to be seen shedding tears. Far greater is the part allotted to the gentler feelings in the epics of a subsequent date, in those written for the English Queen Eleanor, by Benoit "Vivat qui Francos diligit Christus!" ("Prologue of the Salic Law," Pardessus, 1843, p. 345-)

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de Sainte More in the twelfth century, which tell for the first time of the loves of Troilus and Cressida; in those dedicated to Arthur and his knights, where the favour of the mortal deities of whom the heroes are enamoured, is responsible for more feats of chivalry than is the search after the mysterious Grail.

They can take Constantinople, or destroy the Roman armies; they can fight green giants and strange monsters, besiege castles of steel, put traitors to death, and escape even the evil practices of enchanters; but they cannot conquer their passions. All the enemies they have in common with Beowulf, be they men or armies, monsters or sorcerers, they can fight and subdue; but enemies unknown to the Gothic warrior oppose them now more effectually than giants, stormy seas, or armed battalions; enemies that are always present, that are not to be destroyed in battle nor left behind in flight their own indomitable loves and desires. What would the conqueror of Grendel have thought of such descendants? One word in his story answers the question: "Better it is," says he, "for every man, that he avenge his friend than that he mourn much." This is the nearest approach to tenderness discoverable in the 2 whole epic of "Beowulf."

In this contest between heroes differing so greatly in their notion of the duties and possibilities of life with whom do we side, we of to-day? With Beowulf or with Lancelot ? Which of the two has survived? Which of them is nearest of kin to us? Under various names and under very different conditions, Lancelot still continues to live in our thoughts and to play his part in our stories. We shall find him

in the pages of Walter Scott; he is present in the novels of George Eliot. For better or for worse, the literature begun in England by the conquerors at the battle of Hastings still reigns paramount.

Moreover, the new possessors of the English country were fond of tales and short stories, either moving or ámusing, in which a word would make the reader laugh or make him thoughtful; but where there was no tirade, no declamation, no loud emphasis, no vague speculation, a style of writing quite unknown to the islanders and contrary to their genius. When they returned of an evening to their huge and impregnable castles, in perfect security and in good humour, they liked to hear recited stories in prose, some of which are still extant and will never be read without pleasure: the story of Floire and Blanchefleur, for instance, or perhaps, also that of Aucassin, who preferred "his gentle love" to paradise even more unconcernedly than the lover in the old song rejected the gift of "Paris la grand ville;" of Aucassin, in whose adventures the Almighty interposes, not in the manner of the Jehovah of the Bible, but as "God who loveth lovers;" 1 and where Nicolete is so very beautiful that the touch of her fair hands is enough to heal sick people. According to the author the same wonder is performed by the tale itself; it heals sorrow :

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"Nouvelles Françaises en prose," ed. Moland and d'Héricault, Paris, 1856. Four English versions of the story of Floire and Blanchefleur are extant. The story of Amis and Amile was also very popular. "Amis and Amiloun," ed. Kölbing (Heilbronn, 1884). The cantefable of Aucassin is of the twelfth century (G. Paris, "Littérature française au moyen âge," 1888, § 51).

"Sweet the song, the story sweet,
There is no man hearkens it,
No man living 'neath the sun,
So outwearied, so foredone,
Sick and woful, worn and sad,
But is healed, but is glad

'Tis so sweet." I

So speaks the author, and since his time the performance of the same miracle has been the aim of the many tale-writers of all countries; they have not all of them failed.

The fusion of these two sorts of stories, the epicromance and the tale, produced long afterwards in every country of Europe the novel as we know it now. To the former, the novel owes more especially its width of subject, its wealth of incident, its occasionally dignified gait; to the second, its delicacy of observation, its skill in expression of detail, its naturalness, its realism. If we care to examine them closely, we shall find in the greater number of those familiar tragicomedies, which are the novels of our own day, discernible traces of their twofold and far-off origin.

II.

The first result of the diffusion in England, after the Conquest, of a new literature full of southern inventions and gaieties, and loves, and follies, was the silencing of the native singers. This silence lasted for a hundred

Mr. Andrew Lang's translation, "Aucassin and Nicolete" (London, 1887, 16mo.).

years; the very language seemed doomed to disappear. What was the good of writing in English, when there was hardly any one who cared to read it, and even those few were learning French, and coming by degrees to enjoy the new literature? But it turned out that the native English writers had not been swept away for ever. Their race, though silenced, was not extinct : they were not dead, but only asleep.

The first to awake were the scholars, the men who had studied in Paris. It was quite natural that they should be less deeply impressed with nationalism than the rest of their compatriots; learning had made them cosmopolitan; they belonged less to England than to the Latin country, and the Latin country had not suffered from the Conquest. Numerous scholars of English origin shone forth as authors from the twelfth century onwards; among them Geoffrey of Monmouth, of Arthurian fame, Joseph of Exeter, John of Salisbury, Walter Map, Nigel Wireker, and many others of European reputation.

In the thirteenth century another awakening takes place in the palace which the Norman enchanter had doomed to a temporary sleep. Translators and imitators set to work; the English language is again employed; the storm has abated, and it has become evident that there still remain people of English blood and language for whom it is worth while to write. Innumerable books are composed for them, that they may learn, ignorant as they are of French or Latin, what is the thought of the day. Robert Manning de Brunne states, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, that he writes: