[Sidenote: _The later poem._]

[Sidenote: _"False-Seeming."_]

The work which forty years later Jean de Meung (some say at royal
suggestion) added to the piece, so as to make it five times its former
length, has been spoken of generally already, and needs less notice in
detail. Jean de Meung takes up the theme by once more introducing
Reason, whose remonstrances, with the Lover's answers, take nearly
half as much room as the whole story hitherto. Then reappears the
Friend, who is twice as long-winded as Reason, and brings the tale up
to more than ten thousand lines already. At last Love himself takes
some pity of his despairing vassal, and besieges the tower where
Bialacoil is confined. This leads to the introduction of the most
striking and characteristic figure of the second part, _Faux-Semblant_,
a variety of Reynard. Bialacoil is freed: but Danger still guards the
Rose. Love, beaten, invokes the help of his mother, who sends Nature
and Genius to his aid. They talk more than anybody else. But Venus has
to come herself before Danger is vanquished and the Lover plucks the
Rose.

[Sidenote: _Contrast of the parts._]

The appeal of this famous poem is thus twofold, though the allegorical
form in which the appeal is conveyed is the same. In the first part
all the love-poetry of troubadour and _trouvere_ is gathered up and
presented under the guise of a graceful dreamy symbolism, a little
though not much sicklied o'er with learning. In the second the satiric
tendency of the _Fabliaux_ and _Renart_ is carried still further, with
an admixture of not often apposite learning to a much greater extent.
Narcissus was superfluous where William of Lorris introduced him, but
Pygmalion and his image, inserted at great length by Jean de Meung,
when after twenty thousand lines the catastrophe is at length
approaching, are felt to be far greater intruders.

[Sidenote: _Value of both, and charm of the first._]

The completeness of the representation of the time given by the poem
is of course enormously increased by this second part, and the
individual touches, though rather lost in the wilderness of "skipping
octosyllables," are wonderfully sharp and true at times. Yet to some
judgments at any rate the charm of the piece will seem mostly to have
vanished when Bialacoil is once shut up in his tower. In mere poetry
Jean de Meung is almost infinitely the inferior of William of Lorris:
and though the latter may receive but contemptuou