ninety thousand in the texts already published or abstracted;
and this does not include the variants in the Vienna manuscript of
_Renart le Contrefait_, or the different developments of the _Ancien
Renart_, recently published by M. Ernest Martin.

[Sidenote: The Ancien Renart.]

The order and history of the building up of this vast composition are as
follows. The oldest known 'branches,' as the separate portions of the
story are called, date from the beginning of the thirteenth century.
These are due to a named author, Pierre de Saint Cloud. But it is
impossible to say that they were actually the first written in French:
indeed it is extremely improbable that they were so. However this may
be, during the thirteenth century a very large number of poets wrote
pieces independent of each other in composition, but possessing the same
general design, and putting the same personages into play. In what has
hitherto been the standard edition of _Renart_, Meon published
thirty-two such poems, amounting in the aggregate to more than thirty
thousand verses. Chabaille added five more in his supplement, and M.
Ernest Martin has found yet another in an Italianised version. This last
editor thinks that eleven branches, which he has printed together,
constitute an 'ancient collection' within the _Ancien Renart_, and have
a certain connection and interdependence. However this may be, the
general plan is extremely loose, or rather non-existent. Everybody knows
the outline of the story of Reynard; how he is among the animals (Noble
the lion, who is king, Chanticleer the cock, Firapel the leopard,
Grimbart the badger, Isengrin the wolf, and the rest) the special
representative of cunning and valour tempered by discretion, while his
enemy Isengrin is in the same way the type of stupid headlong force, and
many of the others have moral character less strongly marked but
tolerably well sustained. How this general idea is illustrated the
titles of the branches show better than the most elaborate description.
'How Reynard ate the carrier's fish;' 'how Reynard made Isengrin fish
for eels;' 'how Reynard cut the tail of Tybert the cat;' 'how Reynard
made Isengrin go down the well;' 'of Isengrin and the mare;' 'how
Reynard and Tybert sang vespers and matins;' 'the pilgrimage of
Reynard,' and so forth. Written by different persons, and at different
times, these branches are of course by no means uniform in literary
value. But the uniformity of spiri