rned for beauty and spontaneity, for passionate life,
unprecedented and romantic. This was especially the case in the north,
in France and in Germany, and above all in Wales, the country of the
imaginative and highly-gifted Celts. Here life was harder, poorer, more
barbaric; the cultured mind suffered more from its brutal surroundings
than it did in the favoured south. It was here that the great legends of
the Middle Ages, so clearly expressive of the yearning of the period,
were first collected. The early Middle Ages had produced epic poems,
treating scriptural subjects (such as the Harmony of the Gospels of the
monk Otfrit, written in the ninth century), and celebrating the exploits
of popular heroes, as, for instance, the German Song of Hildebrand, and
the French "Chansons de Geste," which contain episodes from the lives of
Charlemagne and his nephew Roland. The true epic, arising from the rich
and poetical Celtic tradition, came into existence in the eleventh
century in the North of France and immediately burst into extraordinary
luxuriance. The legends of the heroes of the dreamy Celtic race--King
Arthur and his knights, Merlin the magician, the knights of the Holy
Grail--travelling across France, became the common property of the
civilised European nations, and filled all hearts with longing and
fantastic dreams. Chrestien de Troyes, in his romances, extolled
knightly exploits and the service of woman, thus producing by the
combination of the older and the newer ideals the novel of adventure
which has fascinated the world for centuries. It is a mistake to believe
that Don Quixote has struck at the root of it; to this day the masses
wax enthusiastic in reading of the doughty deeds of knights, the beauty
of ladies and their unswerving, undying love.

In addition to the great and heroic subjects, there were lesser, more
intimate, and frequently sentimental, romances, especially enjoyed and
widely circulated by the ladies. The baron, riding forth, left his young
wife at home, shut up in her bower and surrounded by spies; sometimes
even physically branded as his property. A prisoner behind bars, her
imagination went out--not to the unloved husband who had married her for
the sake of her broad acres, and could send her back to her parents as
soon as he found a wealthier bride (he had but to maintain that she was
related to him in the fifth degree and the Church was ready to annul the
marriage), not to him, her lord and m