o one of whom, I think, ever quite approaches
the insipidity of their worst English imitators. The knights do not
weary me with their exploits, and I confess that I am hyperbolical
enough to like reading and thinking as well as talking of the ladies
very much. They are of various sorts; but they are generally lovable.
There is no better for affection and faithfulness and pluck than the
Josiane of _Bevis_, whose husband and her at one time faithful guardian,
but at another would-be ravisher, Ascapart, guard a certain gate not
more than a furlong or two from where I am writing. It is good to think
of the (to some extent justified) indignation of l'Orgueilleuse d'Amours
when Sir Blancandin rides up and audaciously kisses her in the midst of
her train; and the companion picture of the tomb where Idoine apparently
sleeps in death (while her true knight Amadas fights with a ghostly foe
above) makes a fitting pendant. If her near namesake with an L prefixed,
the Lidoine of _Meraugis de Portlesguez_, interests me less, it is
because its author, Raoul de Houdenc, was one of the first to mix love
and moral allegory--a "wanity" which is not my favourite "wanity." To
the Alexandrine of _Guillaume de Palerne_ reference has already been
made. Blanchefleur--known all over Europe with her lover Floire (Floris,
etc.)--the Saracen slave who charms a Christian prince, and is rescued
by him from the Emir of Babylon, to whom she has been sold in hopes of
weaning Floris from his attachment, more than deserved her vogue. But,
as in the case of the _chansons_, mere cataloguing would be dull and
unprofitable, and analysis on the scale accorded to _Partenopeus_
impossible. One must only take up once more the note of this whole early
part of our history, and impress again on the reader the evident
_desire_ for the accomplished novel which these numerous romances show;
the inevitable _practice_, in tale-telling of a kind, which the
production of them might have given; and, above all, the openings,
germs, suggestions of new devices in fiction which are observable in
them, and which remained for others to develop if the first finders left
them unimproved.

FOOTNOTES:

[58] That is, of nothing like the length of the latest forms of the
_Chansons de Geste_ or the Arthurian Romances proper. Some of the late
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Adventure stories, before they dropped
into prose, are indeed long enough, and a great deal too long; but they