_bien marry et courrouce_, though no fight
comes off.

The tale is smartly and succinctly told (there are not many more than a
hundred of the small-sized and large-printed pages of the _Collection
Jannet-Picard_), and there is a zest and _verve_ about it which ought to
please any mood that is for the time in harmony with the much talked of
Comic Spirit. But it certainly does not lose attraction, and it as
certainly does not fail to lend some, when it is considered side by side
with the other "John," especially if both are again compared with the
certainly not earlier and probably later "Prose Romances" in English, to
which that rather ambitious title was given by Mr. Thoms. There is
nothing in these in the very remotest degree resembling _Jehan de
Saintre_: you must get on to the _Arcadia_ or at least to _Euphues_
before you come anywhere near that. There is, on the other hand, in our
stuff, a sort of distant community of spirit with _Jehan de Paris_; but
it works in an altogether lower and less imaginative sphere and fashion;
no sense of art being present, and very little of craft. It is
astonishing that a language which had had, if only in verse, such an
unsurpassable tale-teller as Chaucer, should have been so backward. But
then the whole conditions of the fifteenth century, especially in
England, become only the more puzzling the longer one studies them. Even
in France, it will be observed, the output of Tale is by no means
large.[89] Nor shall we find it very greatly increased even in the next
age, though there is one masterpiece in quantity as well as quality.
But, for our purpose, the _Cent Nouvelles_ and the two separate pieces
just discussed continue, and in more and more striking manner, to show
the vast possibilities when the way shall have been clearly found and
the feet of the wayfarers firmly set in it.

FOOTNOTES:

[80] Prose as well as verse.

[81] In the very delightful imaginative introduction to _Quentin
Durward_.

[82] This is one of the points which a modern novelist would certainly
have seized; but whether to advantage or not is another question.

[83] And of course recognised by the "Antonians" as peculiar to La
Salle.

[84] Only contrast "_Tom, Tom_, the piper's son," with "_There was once_
a piper's son," or think how comparatively uninteresting the enormities
of another hero or not-hero would have been if he had been anonymous
instead of being called "Georgy-Porgy Pudding-and-Pie!" ["