l take his seat in Don Quixote's library, and
Nicholas the Barber light his faggots in the yard.

But, as if in compensation of the usurpation of which they had been the
victims, the Carolingian tales, pushed out of the way by the Arthurian
cycle, were not destined to perish. Thrown aside with contempt by the
upper classes, engrossed with the Round Table and the Holy Grail, the
tales of Charlemagne and his paladins, largely adulterated with
Arthurian elements, were apparently cherished by a lower class of
society: burgesses, artizans, and such-like, for whom that Arthurian
world was far too etherial and too delicately immoral; and to this
circumstance is due the fact that the humiliated Carolingian tales
eventually received an artistic embodiment which was not given to the
Arthurian stories. While troubadours and minnesingers were busy with the
court of Arthur, and grave Latinists like Rusticiano of Pisa wrote of
Launcelot and Guenevere; the Carolingian epics seem to have been mainly
sung about by illiterate jongleurs, and to have busied the pens of
prose hackwriters for the benefit of townsfolk. The free towns of the
Netherlands and of Germany appear to have been full of this
unfashionable literature: the Carolingian cycle had become democratic.
And, inasmuch as it was literature no longer for knights and courtiers,
but for artizans and shopkeepers, it went, of course, to the
pre-eminently democratic country of the Middle Ages--Italy. This was at
a time when Italian was not yet a recognized language, and when the men
and women who talked in Tuscan, Lombard, or Venetian dialects, wrote in
Latin and in French; and while Francesca and Paolo read the story of
Launcelot most probably in good mediaeval _langue d'oil_, as befitted
people of high birth; the jongleurs, who collected crowds so large as to
bar the streets and require the interference of the Bolognese
magistrates, sang of Roland and Oliver in a sort of _lingua Franca_ of
French Lombard. French jongleurs singing in impossible French-Italian;
Italian jongleurs singing in impossible French; Paduan penny-a-liners
writing Carolingian cyclical novels in French, not of Paris, assuredly,
but of Padua--a comical and most hideous jabber of hybrid
languages--this was how the Carolingian stories became popular in Italy.
Meanwhile, the day came when the romantic Arthurian tales had to
dislodge in Italy before the invasion of the classic epic. Troy, Rome,
and Thebes had replace