re well known to readers of Boccaccio and the _Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles_ of La Fontaine and his followers. Title after
title--"Du Prestre Crucifie," "Du Prestre et d'Alison," &c.--tells us
that the clergy are going to be lampooned. Sometimes, where the fun is
no worse than childish, it is childish enough--plays on words, jokes
on English mispronunciation of French, and so forth. But it very
seldom, though it is sometimes intolerably nasty, approaches the
sheer drivel which appears in some English would-be comic writing of
the Middle Ages, or the very early Renaissance--such, for instance, as
most of that in the prose "Pleasant Historie of Thomas of
Reading,"[135] which the late Mr Thoms was pleased to call a romance.
Yet the actual stuff of "Thomas of Reading" is very much of the nature
of the _fabliaux_ (except of course the tragical part, which happens
to be the only good part), and so the difference of the handling is
noteworthy. So it is also in English verse-work of the kind--the
"Hunting of the Hare"[136] and the like--to take examples necessarily
a little later than our time.

[Footnote 135: _Early English Prose Romances_ (2d ed., London, 1858),
i. 71. The text of this is only Deloney's and sixteenth century, but
much of the matter must be far earlier.]

[Footnote 136: Weber, iii. 177.]

[Sidenote: _Effect of the_ fabliaux _on language._]

For in these curious compositions the _esprit Gaulois_ found itself
completely at home; indeed some have held that here it hit upon its
most characteristic and peculiar development. The wonderful faculty
for expression--for giving, if not the supreme, yet the adequate and
technically masterly dress to any kind of literary production--which
has been the note of French literature throughout, and which was never
more its note than at this time, enabled the language, as we have seen
and shall see, to keep as by an easy sculling movement far ahead of
all its competitors. But in other departments, with one or two
exceptions, the union of temper and craft, of inspiration and
execution, was not quite perfect. Here there was no misalliance. As
the language lost the rougher, fresher music which gives such peculiar
attraction to the _chansons_, as it disused itself to the varied
trills, the half-inarticulate warblings which constitute the charm of
the lyrics, so it acquired the precision, the flexibility, the
_nettete_, which satiric treatment of the follies and evil chances of
life,