verse and in prose. It is not particularly
attractive in substance; but is not badly told, and would have made
(what it was very likely used as) a good sermon-story.

[Sidenote: _Troilus._]

As _Asseneth_, the first of the three, is by far the shortest, so
_Troilus_, the last, is by far the longest. It is, in fact, nearly
twenty times the length of the history of Joseph's pious impoliteness,
and makes up something like two-thirds of the whole collection. But,
except as a variant of one of the famous stories of the world (_v. sup._
Chap. IV.), it has little interest, and is not even directly taken from
Benoit de Sainte-Maure, but from Guido delle Colonne and Boccaccio, of
whose _Filostrato_ it is, in fact, a mere translation, made apparently
by a known person of high station, Pierre de Beauvau, one of the chief
nobles of Anjou, at the close of the fourteenth and the beginning of the
fifteenth century. It thus brings itself into direct connection with
Chaucer's poem, and has some small importance for literary history
generally. But it has not much for us. It was not Boccaccio's verse but
his prose that was really to influence the French Novel.

[Sidenote: _Foulques Fitzwarin._]

With the middle piece of the volume, _Foulques Fitzwarin_, it is very
different. It is true that the present writer was once "smitten
friendly" by a disciple of the modern severe historical school, who
declared that the adventures of Fitzwarin, though of course adulterated,
were an important historical document, and nothing so frivolous as a
novel. One has, however, a reed-like faculty of getting up again from
such smitings: and for my part I do not hesitate once more to call
_Foulques Fitzwarin_ the first historical prose novel in modern
literature. French in language, as we have it, it is thoroughly English
in subject, and, beyond all doubt, in the original place of composition,
while there is no reason to doubt the assertion that there were older
verse-renderings of the story both in English and French. In fact, they
may turn up yet. But the thing as it stands is a very desirable and even
delectable thing, and well deserved its actual publication, not merely
in the French collection, of which we are speaking, but in the papers of
the too short-lived English Warton Club.

For it is not only our first historical novel, but also the first, as
far as England is concerned, of those outlaw stories which have always
delighted worthy English yout