y,
is pretty certainly worked up into its concrete and extant state by
fiction. The comparison with the two literatures which on the whole bear
such comparison with French best--English and Greek--is here very
striking. People say that there "must have been" many _Beowulfs_: it can
hardly be said that we have so much as a positive assertion of the
existence of even one other, though we have allusions and glances which
have been amplified in the usual fashion. We have positive and not
reasonably doubtful assertion of the existence of a very large body of
more or less early Greek epic; but we have nothing existing except the
_Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.

[Sidenote: The part played by language, prosody, and manners.]

On this fact, be it repeated, if we observe the canons of sound
criticism in the process, too much stress in general cannot be laid.
There must have been some more than ordinary _nisus_ towards
story-telling in a people and a language which produced, and for three
or four centuries cherished, something like a hundred legends, sometimes
of great length, on the single general[14] subject of the exploits,
sufferings, and what not of the great half-historical, half-legendary
emperor _a la barbe florie_, of his son, and of the more legendary than
historical peers, rebels, subjects, descendants, and "those about both"
generally. And though the assertion requires a little more justification
and allowance, there must have been some extraordinary gifts for more or
less fictitious composition when such a vast body of spirited
fictitious, or even half-fictitious, narrative is turned out.

But in this justification as to the last part of the contention a good
deal of care has to be observed. It will not necessarily follow, because
the metal is attractive, that its attractiveness is always of the kind
purely belonging to fiction; and, as a matter of fact, a large part of
it is not. Much is due to the singular sonority and splendour of the
language, which is much more like Spanish than modern French, and which
only a few poets of exceptional power have been able to reproduce in
modern French itself. Much more is imparted by the equally peculiar
character of the metre--the long _tirades_ or _laisses_, assonanced or
mono-rhymed paragraphs in decasyllables or alexandrines, which, to those
who have once caught their harmony, have an indescribable and
unparalleled charm. Yet further, these attractions come from the strange
unf