ad; Archbishop
Turpin, the warrior prelate; Oger the Dane; the traitor Ganelon. And
overhead is God, who will send his angels to bear heavenwards the
soul of the gallant Roland. The idea of the poem is at once national
and religious--the struggle between France, as champion of
Christendom, and the enemies of France and of God. Its spirit is that
of the feudal aristocracy of the eleventh century. The characters
are in some degree representative of general types, but that of Roland
is clearly individualised; the excess of soldierly pride which will
not permit him, until too late, to sound his horn and recall
Charlemagne to his aid, is a glorious fault. When all his comrades
have fallen, he still continues the strife; and when he dies, it is
with his face to the retreating foe. His fall is not unavenged on
the Saracens and on the traitor. The poem is written in decasyllabic
verse--in all 4000 lines--divided into sections or _laisses_ of
varying length, the lines of each _laisse_ being held together by
a single assonance.[2] And such is the form in which the best _chansons
de geste_ are written. The decasyllabic line, derived originally from
popular Latin verse, rhythmical rather than metrical, such as the
Roman legionaries sang, is the favourite verse of the older chansons.
The alexandrine,[3] first seen in the _Pelerinage de Jerusalem_ of
the early years of the twelfth century, in general indicates later
and inferior work. The _laisse_, bound in one by its identical
assonance, might contain five lines or five hundred. In chansons of
late date the full rhyme often replaces assonance; but inducing, as
it did in unskilled hands, artificial and feeble expansions of the
sense, rhyme was a cause which co-operated with other causes in the
decline of this form of narrative poetry.

[Footnote 2: _Assonance_, _i.e._ vowel-rhyme, without an agreement
of consonants.]

[Footnote 3: Verse of twelve syllables, with cesura after the sixth
accented syllable. In the decasyllabic line the cesura generally
followed the fourth, but sometimes the sixth, tonic syllable.]

Naturally the chansons which celebrated the achievements of one epic
personage or one heroic family fell into a group, and the idea of
cycles of songs having arisen, the later poets forced many independent
subjects to enter into the so-called cycle of the king (Charlemagne),
or that of William of Orange, or that of Doon of Mayence. The second
of these had, indeed, a genuin