reprisals in the cases of Hesione and Helen suited the demands of the time; and, as has been hinted, the singular interlardings of truce and war, and the shutting up of the latter into so many days' hand-tohand fighting, with no strategy, no care for communications, no scientific nonsense of any kind,-were exactly to mediæval taste.

Above all, the prominence of new heroes and heroines, about whom not very much was said, and whose gestes the medieval writer could accordingly fill up at his own will, with the presentation of others in a light different from that of the classical accounts, was a godsend. Achilles, as the principal author of the "Excidium Troja" (the title of the Dares book, and after it of others), must be blackened; and though Dares himself does not contain the worst accusations of the mediæval writers against the unshorn son of the seagoddess, it clears the way for them by taking away the excuse of the unjust deprivation of Briseis. From this to making him not merely a factious partisan, but an unfair fighter, who mobs his enemies half to Ideath with Myrmidons before he engages them him

self, is not far. name in the older stories, offers himself as a hero.

On the other hand, Troilus, a mere

Troilus and

Briseida.

And for a heroine, the casual mention of the charms of Briseida in Dares started

the required game. Helen was too puzzling, as well as too Greek; Andromache only a faithful wife;

a scolding sorceress; Polyxena a victim.

Cassandra a

Briseida had almost a clear record, as after the confusion with Chryseis (to be altered in name after

wards) there was very little personality left in her, and she could for that very reason be dealt with as the romancers pleased.

In the subsequent and vernacular handling of the story the same difference of alternation is at first perceived as that which appears in the Alexander legend. The sobriety of Gautier of Châtillon's Alexandreis is matched and its Latinity surpassed by the Bellum Trojanum of our countryman Joseph of Exeter, who was long and justly praised as about the best medieval writer of classical Latin verse. But this neighbourhood of the streams of history and fiction ceases much earlier in the Trojan case, and for very obvious reasons. The temperament of medieval poets urged them to fill in and fill out: the structure of the Daretic epitome invited them to do so: and they very shortly did it.

de Troie.

romanc

After some controversy, the credit of first “ ing" the Tale of Troy has been, it would seem justly The Roman and finally, assigned to Benoît de SainteMore. Benoît, whose flourishing time was about 1160, who was a contemporary and rival of Wace, and who wrote a chronicle of Normandy even longer than his Troy-book, composed the latter in more than thirty thousand octosyllabic lines, an expansion of the fifty pages of Dares, which stands perhaps almost alone even among the numerous similar feats of medieval bards. He has helped himself freely with matter from Dictys towards the end of his work; but, as we have seen, even this reinforcement could not be great in bulk. Expansion, however,

M

so difficult to some writers, was never in the least a stumbling block to the trouvère. It was rather a bottomless pit into which he fell, traversing in his fall lines and pages with endless alacrity of sinning. Not that Benoît is by any means a person to be contemptuously spoken of. In the first place, as we shall see presently, he was for many hundred years completely and rather impudently robbed of his fame; in the second, he is the literary ancestor of far greater men than himself; and in the third, his verse, though not free from the besetting sin of its kind, and especially of the octosyllabic variety-the sin of smooth but insignificant fluency-is always pleasant, and sometimes picturesque. Still there is no doubt that at present the second claim is the strongest with us; and that if Benoît de Sainte-More had not, through his plagiarist Colonna, been the original of Boccaccio and Chaucer and Shakespeare, he would require little more than a bare mention here.

Dares, as we have seen, mentions Briseida, and extols her beauty and charm: she was, he says, The phases of “beautiful, not of lofty stature, fair, her Cressid. hair yellow and silky, her eyebrows joined, her eyes lively, her body well proportioned, kind, affable, modest, of a simple mind, and pious." He also mightily extols Troilus; but he does not intimate any special connection between the two, or tell the story of "Cressid," which indeed his followers elaborated in terms not altogether consistent with some of the above laudatory epithets. Tzetzes, who with some others gives her the alternative name of Hippodamia,

alters her considerably, and assigns to her tall stature, a white complexion, black hair, as well as specially comely breasts, cheeks, and nose, skill in dress, a pleasant smile, but a distinct tendency to "arrogance." Both these writers, however, with Joseph of Exeter and others, seem to be thinking merely of the Briseis whom we know from Homer as the mistress of Achilles, and do not connect her with Calchas, much less with. Troilus. What may be said with some confidence is that the confusion of Briseida with the daughter of Calchas and the assignment of her to Troilus as his love originated with Benoît de Sainte-More. But we must perhaps hesitate a little before assigning to him quite so much credit as has sometimes been allowed him. Long before Shakespeare received the story in its full development (for though he does not carry it to the bitter end in Troilus and Cressida itself, the allusion to the "lazar kite of Cressid's kind" in Henry V. shows that he knew it) it had reached that completeness through the hands of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Henryson, the least of whom was capable of turning a comparatively barren donnée into a rich possession, and who as a matter of fact each added much. We do not find in the Norman trouvère, and it would be rather wonderful if we did find, the gay variety of the Filostrato and its vivid picture of Cressid as merely passionate, Chaucer's admirable Pandarus and his skilfully blended heroine, or the infinite pathos of Henryson's final interview. Still, all this great and moving romance would have been impossible without the idea of Cressid's successive sojourn in Troy and the Greek

camp, and of her successive courtship by Troilus and by Diomed. And this Benoît really seems to have thought of first. His motives for devising it have been rather idly inquired into. For us it shall be sufficient that he did devise it.

By an easy confusion with Chryses and Chryseis -half set right afterwards in the change from Briseida to Griseida in Boccaccio and Creseide in Chaucerhe made his heroine the daughter of Calchas. The priest, a traitor to Troy but powerful with the Greeks, has left his daughter in the city and demands her— a demand which, with the usual complacency noticed above as characterising the Trojans in Dares himself, is granted, though they are very angry with Calchas. But Troilus is already the damsel's lover; and a bitter parting takes place between them. She is sent, gorgeously equipped, to the Greeks; and it happens to be Diomed who receives her. He at once makes the fullest declarations-for in nothing did the Middle Age believe more fervently than in the sentiment,

"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”

It

But Briseida, with a rather excessive politeness, and leaving him a good deal of hope, informs him that she has already a fair friend yonder. Whereat, as is reasonable, he is not too much discouraged. must be supposed that this is related to Troilus, for in the next fight he, after Diomed has been wounded, reproaches Briseida pretty openly. He is not wrong, for Briseida weeps at Diomed's wound, and (to the regret and reproof of her historian, and indeed against