of
curiosity than either of the others. It neither constitutes a capital
division of general literature like the Arthurian story, nor embodies
and preserves a single long-past phase in national spirit and
character, like the _chansons de geste_. From certain standpoints of
the drier and more rigid criticism it is exposed to the charge of
being trifling, almost puerile. We cannot understand--or, to speak
with extremer correctness, it would seem that some of us cannot
understand--the frame of mind which puts Dictys and Dares on the one
hand, Homer on the other, as authorities to be weighed on equal terms,
and gravely sets Homer aside as a very inferior and prejudiced person;
which, even after taking its Dictys and Dares, proceeds to supplement
them with entire inventions of its own; which, after in the same way
taking the Pseudo-Callisthenes as the authoritative biographer of
Alexander, elaborates the legend with a wild luxuriance that makes the
treatment of the Tale of Troy seem positively modest and sober; which
makes Thebes, Julius Caesar, anything and anybody in fabulous and
historical antiquity alike, the centre, or at least the nucleus, of
successive accretions of romantic fiction.

[Footnote 68: See note 2, p. 26.]

[Sidenote: _Its importance--the Troy story._]

Nevertheless, the attractions, intrinsic and extrinsic, of the
division are neither few nor small. This very confusion, as it seems
nowadays, this extraordinary and almost monstrous blending of
uncritical history and unbridled romance, shows one of the most
characteristic sides of the whole matter, and exhibits, as do few
other things, that condition of mediaeval thought in regard to all
critical questions which has so constantly to be insisted on. As in
the case of the Arthurian story, the matter thus presented caught hold
of the mediaeval imagination with a remarkable grip, and some of the
most interesting literary successions of all history date from it.
Among them it is almost enough to mention the chain of names--Benoit
de Sainte-More, Guido Colonna, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson--which
reaches Shakespeare, and does not cease with him, all successively
elaborating the history of Troilus and Cressida. The lively story,
first formed, like so many others, by the French genius, and well, if
rather impudently, copied by Colonna; Boccaccio's vivid Italian
Cressida; Chaucer's inimitable Pandarus, the first pleasing example of
the English talent for humorou