because it
expresses a different order of literary endeavour from those divisions
which have hitherto been treated. The language of the middle ages was
ill-suited for work other than narrative; for narrative work it was
supremely well adapted. Yet the prose fiction which we have is not on
the whole equal in merit to the poetry, though in one or two instances
it is of great value. The medium of communication was not generally
known or used until the period of decadence had been reached, and the
peculiar defects of mediaeval literature, prolixity and verbiage, show
themselves more conspicuously and more annoyingly in prose than in
verse. We have, however, some remarkable work of the later periods, and
in the latest of all we have one writer, Antoine de la Salle, who
deserves to rank with the great chroniclers as a fashioner of French
prose.

The French prose fiction of the middle ages resolves itself into several
classes: the early Arthurian Romances already noticed; the scattered
tales of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which are chiefly to
be studied in two excellent volumes of the _Bibliotheque
Elzevirienne_[144]; the versions of such collections of legends, chiefly
oriental in origin, as the _History of the Seven Wise Men_ and the
_Gesta Romanorum_; the longer classical romances in prose; the late
prose _remaniements_ of the great verse epics and romances of the
twelfth century; and the more or less original work of the fifteenth
century, when prose was becoming an independent and coequal literary
exponent. The first class requires no further mention; of the third, the
editions of the _Roman des Sept Sages_, by M. Gaston Paris[145], and of
the _Violier des Histoires Romaines_, by M. Gustave Brunet[146], may be
referred to as sufficient instances; of the fourth a very interesting
specimen has been made accessible by the publication of the prose _Roman
de Jules Cesar_ of Jean de Tuim[147], a free version from Lucan made
apparently in the course of the thirteenth century, and afterwards
imitated by the author of the verse romance; the fifth, though very
numerous, are not of much value, though the great romance of
_Perceforest_ and a few others may be excepted from this general
condemnation. The second and the last deserve a longer mention.

The tales of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as published by
MM. Moland and Hericault, are eight in number. Those of the second
volume are on the whole inferior in