s natural to
suppose that this most popular of Middle-Age productions should have
originated in the very region which later gave to the world a school
of painting that incarnated on canvas the phases of animal life,
taking its delight and best inspirations in the burlesque side of
human passions.

In its first period, Flemish literature found some encouragement from
its princes. John I. of Brabant fostered it, and even took, himself,
the title of Flemish Troubadour. Under Guy of Dampierre, who neither
in heart nor mind was sympathetic with the people he ruled, we find
Maerlant, still revered by his country; his name is ever coupled with
the epithet of Father of Flemish Poets. Didactic rather than poetical,
his influence was great in breaking down the barriers which separated
the people from the higher classes, by adapting to their own
home-idiom the best productions of the age. About this period we find
prevalent those Northern singers corresponding to the _Trouveres_,
_Troubadours_, and _Jongleurs_. They are in Flanders the _Spreker_,
_Segger_, and _Vinder_, who, when travelling through the country, took
the name of _Gezel_, received in town or village, court or hamlet, as
the wandering minstrel of the South. The golden age when sovereigns
doffed their royal robes to lay them on the shoulders of some
sweet-singing poet, as the old chronicles tell us, was of short
duration in the North, if ever the _Sproken_ or erotic poems may be
said to have brought their authors into such favor. On the other hand,
we find some of the wanderers arrested for theft and other crimes.

Little light has been thrown on their first ante-historical attempts.
Until the late labors of German philologers, little had been done to
clear up the confusion resting on this period of literary history. As
yet the field has scarcely been explored beyond the regions not
immediately connected with the literature of Germany. We have long
historical poems of little interest, arranged without
order,--interminable productions of thousands and ten thousands of
lines of uncertain date, didactic and encyclopedia-like, besides
unmistakable remnants of a Netherlandish theatre.

The battle of Roosebeke, where the second Artevelde and his companions
succumbed to superior numbers, was the last great enterprise of the
Flemings against the French. Half a century earlier, a strong league
had been formed against these powerful neighbors. In the interior, the
country w