so partial to the
feminine sex, and his work, though equally fresh and vigorous, is more
complex and less artistically finished. It is in part autobiographic,
and introduces Adam confessing to friends with sufficient effrontery his
intention of going to Paris and deserting his wife. This part contains a
very pretty though curiously unsuitable description of the wooing, which
has such an unlucky termination. Suddenly, however, the author
introduces his father, an old citizen, who is quite ready to encourage
his son in his evil ways provided it costs him nothing, and the piece
loses all regularity of plot. Divers citizens of Arras, male and female,
are introduced with a more or less satiric intention, and the last
episode brings in the personages of Morgue la Fee and of the _mesnie_
(attendants) of a certain shadowy King Hellequin. There is a doctor,
too, whose revelations of his patients' affairs are sufficiently comic,
not to say farcical. Destitute as it is of method, and approaching more
nearly to the Fabliau than to any other division of mediaeval literature
in the coarseness of its language, the piece has great interest, not
merely because of its date and its apparent originality, but because of
numerous passages of distinct literary merit. The picture of the
neglected wife in her girlhood is inferior to nothing of the kind even
in the thirteenth century, that fertile epoch of early French poetry.
The father, too, Maitre Henri, the earliest of his kind on the modern
stage, has traits which the great comic masters would not disown.

The classes of later secular drama may be thus divided,--the monologue,
the farce, the morality, the _sotie_, the profane mystery. The first
four of these constitute one of the most interesting divisions of early
French literature; and it is to be hoped that before long easy access
will be afforded to the whole of it. The last is only interesting from
the point of view of literary history.

[Sidenote: Monologues.]

The monologue is the simplest form of dramatic composition and needs but
little notice, though it seems to have met with some favour from
playgoers of the time. By dint also of adroit changes of costume and
assistance from scenery, etc., the monologue was sometimes made more
complicated than appears at first sight possible, as for instance, in
the _Monologue du Bien et du Mal des Dames_, where the speaker plays
successively the parts of two advocates and of a judge. The mono