n as the romance of 'Calila and
Dimna,' and the story of Sendabar (in its Greek form Syntipas). This was
immensely popular in France under the verse form of _Dolopathos_, and
the prose form of _Les sept Sages de Rome_. The remarkable collection of
stories called the _Gesta Romanorum_ is apparently of later date than
most of the Fabliaux; but the tales of which it was composed no doubt
floated for some time in the mouths of Jongleurs before the unknown and
probably English author put them together in Latin.

[Sidenote: The Roman du Renart.]

Closely connected with the Fabliaux is one of the most singular works of
mediaeval imagination, the _Roman du Renart_[62]. This is no place to
examine the origin or antiquity of the custom of making animals the
mouthpieces of moral and satirical utterance on human affairs. It is
sufficient that the practice is an ancient one, and that the middle ages
were early acquainted with Aesop and his followers, as well as with
Oriental examples of the same sort. The original author, whoever he was,
of the epic (for it is no less) of 'Reynard the Fox,' had therefore
examples of a certain sort before his eyes. But these examples contented
themselves for the most part with work of small dimension, and had not
attempted connected or continuous story. A fierce battle has been fought
as to the nationality of Reynard. The facts are these. The oldest form
of the story now extant is in Latin. It is succeeded at no very great
interval by German, Flemish, and French versions. Of these the German as
it stands is apparently the oldest, the Latin version being probably of
the second half of the twelfth century, and the German a little later.
But (and this is a capital point) the names of the more important beasts
are in all the versions French. From this and some minute local
indications, it seems likely that the original language of the epic is
French, but French of the Walloon or Picard dialect, and that it was
written somewhere in the district between the Seine and the Rhine. This,
however, is a matter of the very smallest literary importance. What is
of great literary importance is the fact that it is in France that the
story receives its principal development, and that it makes its home.
The Latin, Flemish, and German Reynards, though they all cover nearly
the same ground, do not together amount to more than five-and-twenty
thousand lines. The French in its successive developments amounts to
more than