t Mediaeval in character. We must, of course,
abstain from "reading back" Chaucer or even Boccaccio into Benoit or
into his probable plagiarist Guido de Columnis; but there is nothing
uncritical or wrong in "reading forward" from these to the later
writers. The hedge-rose is there, which will develop into, and serve as
a support for, the hybrid perpetual--a term which could itself be
developed in application, after the fashion of a mediaeval _moralitas_.
And when we have actually come to Pandaro and Deiphobus, to the "verse
of society," as it may be called in a new sense, of the happier part of
Chaucer and to the intense tragedy of the later part of Henryson, then
we are in the workshop, if not in the actual show-room, of the completed
novel. It would be easy, as it was not in the case of the _chansons_,
to illustrate directly by a translation, either here from Benoit or
later from the shortened prose version of the fourteenth century, which
we also possess; but it is not perhaps necessary, and would require much
space.

[Sidenote: _Alexander._]

The influence of the Alexander story, though scarcely less, is of a
widely different kind. In _Troilus_, as has been said, the Middle Age is
working on scarcely more than the barest hints of antiquity, which it
amplifies and supplements out of its own head and its own heart--a head
which can dream dream-webs of subtlest texture unknown to the ancients,
and a heart which can throb and bleed in a fashion hardly shown by any
ancient except Sappho. With the Alexander group we find it much more
passively recipient, though here also exercising its talent for varying
and amplification. The controversies over the pseudo-Callisthenes,
"Julius Valerius," the _Historia de Praeliis_, etc., are once more not
for us; but results of them, which have almost or quite emerged from the
state of controversy, are. It is certain that the appearance, in the
classical languages, of the wilder legends about Alexander was as early
at least as the third century after Christ--that is to say, long before
even "Dark" let alone "Middle" Ages were thought of--and perhaps
earlier. There seems to be very little doubt that these legends were of
Egyptian or Asiatic origin, and so what we vaguely call "Oriental." They
long anticipated the importing afresh of such influences by the
Crusades, and they must, with all except Christians and Jews (that is to
say, with the majority), have actually forestalled the Orient