her own conscience) gives herself to the Greek, or determines to do so, on the philosophical principle that Troilus is lost to her. Achilles then kills Troilus himself, and we hear no more of the lady. The volubility of Benoît assigns divers long speeches to Briseida, in which favourable interpreters have seen the germ of the future Cressid; and in which any fair critic may see the suggestion of her. But it is little more than a suggestion. Of the full and masterly conception of Cressid as a type of woman which was afterwards reached, Troilus, and Diomed, and Pandarus, and the wrath of the gods were essential features. Here Troilus is a shadow, Diomed not much more, Pandarus non-existent, the vengeance of Love on a false lover unthought of. Briseida, though she has changed her name, and parentage, and status, is still, as even the patriotic enthusiasm of MM. Moland and d'Héricault (the first who did Benoît justice) perceives, the Briseis of Homer, a slave - girl who changes masters, and for her own pleasure as well as her own safety is chiefly anxious to please the master that is near. The vivifying touch was brought by Boccaccio, and Boccaccio falls out of our story. The Historia But between Benoît and Boccaccio there is another personage who concerns us very distinctly. Never was there such a case, even in the Middle Ages, when the absence of printing, of public libraries, and of general knowledge of literature made such things easy, of sic vos non vobis as the Historia Trojana of Guido de Columnis, otherwise Guido delle Colonne, or Guido Colonna, of Mes sina. This person appears to have spent some time in England rather late in the thirteenth century; and there, no doubt, he fell in with the Roman de Troie. He wrote-in Latin, and thereby appealing to a larger audience than even French could appeal to a Troybook which almost at once became widely popular. The MSS. of it occur by scores in the principal libraries of Europe; it was the direct source of Boccaccio, and with that writer's Filostrato of Chaucer, and it formed the foundation of almost all the known Troybooks of the fourteenth and fifteeenth centuries, Benoît being completely forgotten. Yet recent investigation has shown that Guido not merely adapted Benoît in the usual mediæval fashion, but followed him so closely that his work might rather be called translation than adaptation. At any rate, beyond a few details he has added nothing to the story of Troilus and Cressida as Benoît left it, and as, in default of all evidence to the contrary, it is only fair to conclude that he made it. From the date, 1287, of Guido delle Colonne's version, it follows necessarily that all the vernacular Troybooks-our own Destruction of Troy,1 the French prose romance of Troilus,2 &c., not to mention Lydgate and others fall like Boccaccio and Chaucer out of the limits of this volume. Nor can it be necessary to enter into detail as to the other classical French romances, the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman d'Enéas, the Roman de Jules César, Athis and Profilias, and the 1 Ed. Panton and Donaldson, E.E. T.S. London, 1869-74. 1 rest; while something will be said of the German Æneid of H. von Veldeke in a future chapter. The capital examples of the Alexandreid and the Iliad, as understood by the Middle Ages, not only must but actually do suffice for our purpose. Meaning of romance. And we see from them very well not merely in what light the Middle Ages regarded the classical stories, but also to what extent the classical the classical stories affected the Middle Ages. This latter point is of the more importance in that even yet the exact bearing and meaning of the Renaissance in this respect is by no means universally comprehended. It may be hoped, if not very certainly trusted, that most educated persons have now got rid of the eighteenth-century notion of medieval times as being almost totally ignorant of the classics themselves, a notion which careful reading of Chaucer alone should be quite sufficient to dispel. The fact of course is, that all through the Middle Ages the Latin classics were known, unequally but very fairly in most cases, while the earlier Middle Ages at least were by no means ignorant of Greek. But although there was by no means total ignorance, there was what is to us a scarcely comprehensible want of understanding. To the average mediæval student, perhaps to any mediæval student, it seems seldom or never to have occurred that the men of whom he was reading had lived under a dispensation 1 The section on L'Epopée Antique" in M. Petit de Julleville's book, more than once referred to, is by M. Léopold Constans, editor of the Roman de Thèbes, and will be found useful, so different from his own in law and in religion, in politics and in philosophy, in literature and in science, that an elaborate process of readjustment was necessary in order to get at anything like a real comprehension of them. Nor was he, as a rule, able-men of transcendent genius being rather rare, amid a more than respectable abundance of men of talent-to take them, as Chaucer did to a great extent, Dante more intensely though less widely, and Shakespeare (but Shakespeare had already felt the Renaissance spirit) fully and perfectly, on the broad ground of humanity, so that anachronisms, and faults of costume, matter not one jot to any one but a pedant or a fool. When he came to something in the story-something in sentiment, manners, religion, what not-which was out of the range of his own experience, he changed it into something within the range of his own experience. When the whole story did not lend itself to the treatment which he wished to apply, he changed it, added to it, left out from it, without the slightest scruple. He had no more difficulty in transforming the disciplined tactic of the Macedonian phalanx into a series of random chevauchées than in adjusting the much more congenial front - fighting of Greeks and Trojans to his own ideas; and it cost him little more to engraft a whole brand-new romantic lovestory on the Tale of Troy than to change the historical siege of Gaza into a Fuerres de Gadres, of which Aimeri of Narbonne or Raoul de Cambrai would have been the appropriate hero. Sometimes, indeed, he simply confounded Persians and Saracens, just as else where he confounded Saracens and Vikings; and he introduced high priests of heathen divinities as bishops, with the same sang froid with which long afterwards the translators of the Bible founded an order of "dukes" in Edom. A study of antiquity conducted in such a fashion could hardly have coloured mediæval thought with any real classicism, even if it had been devoted to much more genuine specimens of antiquity than the semi-Oriental medley of the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the bit of bald euhemerism which had better have been devoted to Hephæstus than ascribed to his priest. But, by another very curious fact, the two great and commanding examples of the Romance of Antiquity were executed each under the influence of the flourishing of one of the two mightiest branches of mediæval poetry proper. When Alberic and the decasyllabist (whoever he was) wrote, the chanson de geste was in the very prime of its most vigorous manhood, and the Roman d'Alixandre accordingly took not merely the outward form, but the whole spirit of the chanson de geste itself. And when Benoît de Sainte-More gave the first shapings of the great story of Troilus and Cressida out of the lifeless rubbish-heap of Dares, it was at the precise minute when also, in hands known or unknown, the greater story of Arthur and Gawain, of Lancelot and Guinevere, was shaping itself from materials probably even scantier. Even Guido of the Columns, much more Boccaccio, had this story fully before them; and Cressida, when at last she becomes herself, has, if nothing of the majesty of Guinevere, a |