yric of wonderful charm and
abundance, the vast comic wealth of the _fabliaux_, and the
_Fox_-epic, prose not merely of laws and homilies and rudimentary
educational subjects, but of every variety, drama, history,
philosophy, allegory, dream.

[Sidenote: _The rise of Allegory._]

To give an account of these various things in great detail would not
merely be impossible here, but would injure the scheme and thwart the
purpose of this history. We must survey them in the gross, or with a
few examples--showing the lessons taught and the results achieved,
from the lyric, which was probably the earliest, to the drama and the
prose story, which were pretty certainly the latest of the French
experiments. But we must give largest space to the singular growth of
Allegory. This, to some extent in the beast-epic, to a far greater in
one of the most epoch-making of European books, the _Romance of the
Rose_, set a fashion in Europe which had hardly passed away in three
hundred years, and which, latterly rather for the worse, but in the
earlier date not a little for the better, coloured not merely the work
directly composed in imitation of the great originals, but all
literary stuff of every kind, from lyric to drama, and from sermons to
prose tales.

[Sidenote: _Lyric._]

It has been said elsewhere that the shaping of a prosody suitable for
lyric was the great debt which Europe owes to the language of
Provence. And this is not at all inconsistent with the undoubted
critical fact that in a _Corpus Lyricorum_ the best songs of the
northern tongues would undoubtedly rank higher, according to all sound
canons of poetical criticism, than the best lyrics of the southern.
For, as it happens, we have lyrics in at least two most vigorous
northern tongues before they had gone to school to southern prosody,
and we can see at once the defects in them. The scanty remains of
Anglo-Saxon lyric and the more copious remains of Icelandic display,
with no little power and pathos, and plenty of ill-organised "cry," an
almost total lack of ability to sing. Every now and then their natural
genius enables them to hit, clumsily and laboriously, on
something--the refrain of the _Complaint of Deor_, the stepped stanzas
of the _Lesson of Loddfafni_--resembling the more accomplished methods
of more educated and long-descended literatures. But the poets are
always in a Robinson Crusoe condition, and worse: for Robinson had at
least seen the tools and utensi