n num,
Claimet sa culpe, si regardet amunt,
Cuntre le ciel ainsdoux ses mains ad juinz,
Si priet deu que pareis li duinst.
Morz est Turpin le guerrier Charlun.
Par granz batailles e par mult bels sermuns
Contre paiens fut tuz tens campiuns.
Deus li otreit seinte beneicun.
Aoi!"[28]

[Footnote 28: _Roland_, ll. 2233-2246.]

Then turn to, perhaps, the very last poem which can be called a
_chanson de geste_ proper in style, _Le Bastart de Bouillon_, and open
on these lines:--

"Pardevant la chite qui Miekes[29] fut clamee
Fu grande la bataille, et fiere la mellee,
Enchois car on eust nulle tente levee,
Commencha li debas a chelle matinee.
Li cinc frere paien i mainent grant huee,
Il keurent par accort, chascuns tenoit l'espee,
Et une forte targe a son col acolee.
Esclamars va ferir sans nulle demoree,
Un gentil crestien de France l'onneree--
Armeire n'i vault une pomme pelee;
Sus le senestre espaulle fu la chars atamee,
Le branc li embati par dedans la coree,[30]
Mort l'abat du cheval; son ame soit sauvee!"[31]

[Footnote 29: _I.e._, Mecca.]

[Footnote 30: _Coree_ is not merely = _coeur_, but heart, liver, and
all the upper "inwards."]

[Footnote 31: _Li Bastars de Bouillon_ (ed. Scheler, Brussels, 1877).]

This is in no way a specially fine passage, it is the very "padding"
of the average _chanson_, but what padding it is! Compare the mere
sound, the clash and clang of the verse, with the ordinary English
romance in _Sir Thopas_ metre, or even with the Italian poets. How
alert, how succinct, how finished it is beside the slip-shodness of
the first, in too many instances;[32] how manly, how intense, beside
the mere sweetness of the second! The very ring of the lines brings
mail-shirt and flat-topped helmet before us.

[Footnote 32: Not always; for the English romance of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries has on the whole been too harshly dealt with.
But its _average_ is far below that of the _chansons_.]

[Sidenote: _Peculiarity of the_ geste _system._]

But in order to the proper comprehension of this section of
literature, it is necessary that something more should be said as well
of the matter at large as of the construction and contents of separate
poems; and, most of all, of the singular process of adjustment of
these separate poems by which the _geste_ proper (that is to say, the
subdivision of the