ms,[85] and no doubt the result was all the more welcome to
the taste of the time. But for that very reason the appetites and
tastes, which could glut themselves with the full dramatic
representation, might care less for the mere narrative, on the famous
principle of _segnius irritant_. Nor was the political state of France
during the time very favourable to letters. There are, however, two
separate fifteenth-century stories which deserve notice. One of them is
the rather famous, though probably not widely read, _Petit Jehan de
Saintre_ of the already mentioned Antoine de la Salle, a certain work
of his this time. The other is the pleasant, though to Englishmen
intentionally uncomplimentary, _Jehan de Paris_ of an unknown writer. La
Salle's book must belong to the later middle of the century, though, if
he died in or about 1461, not to a very late middle. _Jehan de Paris_
has been put by M. de Montaiglon nearer the close.

[Sidenote: _Petit Jehan de Saintre._]

The history of "little John of Saintre and the Lady of the Beautiful
Cousins"[86] has not struck all judges, even all English judges,[87] in
the same way. Some have thought it mawkish, rhetorical, clumsily
imitative of the manners of dead chivalry, and the like. Others,
admitting it to be a late and "literary" presentation of the stately
society it describes, rank it much higher as such. Its author was a
bitter enough satirist if he wrote, as he most probably did, the famous
_Quinze Joyes de Mariage_, one of the most unmitigated pieces of
unsweetened irony--next to _A Tale of a Tub_ and _Jonathan Wild_--to be
found in literature; but not couched in narrative form. The same quality
appears of course in the still more famous farce of _Pathelin_, which
few good judges deny very stoutly to him, though there is little
positive evidence. In the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ again, as has been
said, he certainly had a hand, and possibly a great hand, as well as
perhaps elsewhere. The satiric touch appears even in _Petit Jehan_
itself; for, after all the gracious courtship of the earlier part, the
_dame des belles Cousines_, during an absence of her lover on service,
falls a by no means, as it would seem, very reluctant victim to the
vulgar viciousness of a rich churchman, just like the innominatas of the
_nouvelles_ themselves. But the earlier part _is_ gracious--a word
specifically and intensively applicable to it. It may be a little
unreal; does not the secondary form a