estimation, there is neither purely romantic interest, as in the Palfrey, nor the interest of "the pity of it,” as in the piece just quoted; but an ethical purpose, showing out of the mouth of babes and sucklings the danger of filial ingratitude. But, as a general rule, there is little that is serious in these frequently graceless but generally amusing compositions. There is a curious variety about them, and incidentally a crowd of lively touches of common life. The fisherman of the Seine starts for his day's work or sport with oar and tackle; the smith plies the forge; the bath plays a considerable part in the stories, and we learn that it was not an unknown habit to eat when bathing, which seems to be an unwise attempt to double luxuries. A short sketch of medieval catering might be got out of the fabliaux, where figure not merely the usual dainties-capons, partridges, pies well peppered-but eels salted, dried, and then roasted, or more probably grilled, as we grill kippered salmon. Here we have a somewhat less grimy original—perhaps it was actually the original— of Skelton's "Tunning of Elinor Rumming"; and in many places other patterns, the later reproductions of which are well known to readers of Boccaccio and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles of La Fontaine and his followers. Title after title-" Du Prestre Crucifié," "Du Prestre et d'Alison," &c.-tells us that the clergy are going to be lampooned. Sometimes, where the fun is no worse than childish, it is childish enoughplays on words, jokes on English mispronunciation of French, and so forth. But it very seldom, though it is sometimes intolerably nasty, approaches the sheer drivel which appears in some English would-be comic writing of the Middle Ages, or the very early Renaisance-such, for instance, as most of that in the prose "Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading," which the late Mr Thoms was pleased to call a romance. Yet the actual stuff of "Thomas of Reading" is very much of the nature of the fabliaux (except of course. the tragical part, which happens to be the only good part), and so the difference of the handling is noteworthy. So it is also in English verse-work of the kind—the “Hunting of the Hare"2 and the like—to take examples necessarily a little later than our time. Effect of the fabliaux on language, For in these curious compositions the esprit Gaulois found itself completely at home; indeed some have held that here it hit upon its most characteristic and peculiar development. The wonderful faculty for expression — for giving, if not the supreme, yet the adequate and technically masterly dress to any kind of literary production which has been the note of French literature throughout, and which was never more its note than at this time, enabled the language, as we have seen and shall see, to keep as by an easy sculling movement far ahead of all its competitors. But in other departments, with one or two exceptions, the union of temper and craft, of The 1 Early English Prose Romances (2d ed., London, 1858), i. 71. text of this is only Deloney's and sixteenth century, but much of the matter must be far earlier. 2 Weber, iii. 177. inspiration and execution, was not quite perfect. Here there was no misalliance. As the language lost the rougher, fresher music which gives such peculiar attraction to the chansons, as it disused itself to the varied trills, the half inarticulate warblings which constitute the charm of the lyrics, so it acquired the precision, the flexibility, the netteté, which satiric treatment of the follies and evil chances of life, the oddities of manners and morals, require. It became bright, if a little hard, easy, if a little undistinguished, capable of slyness, of innuendo, of "malice," but not quite so capable as it had been of the finer and vaguer suggestions and aspirations. And on narrative. Above all, these fabliaux served as an exerciseground for the practice in which French was to become almost if not quite supreme, the practice of narrative. In the longer romances, which for a century or a century and a half preceded the fabliaux, the art of narration, as has been more than once noticed, was little attended to, and indeed had little scope. The chansons had a common form, or something very like it, which almost dispensed the trouvère from devoting much pains to the individual conduct of the story. The most abrupt transitions were accustomed, indeed expected; minor incidents received very little attention; the incessant fighting secured the attention of the probable hearers by itself; the more grandiose and striking incidents--the crowning of Prince Louis and the indignation of William at his sister's ingratitude, Conditions of for instance-were not "engineered" or led up to in any way, but left to act in mass and by assault. The smaller and more delicate range - however indelicate argument of the fabliaux not only invited but almost necessitated a different kind fabliau-writing. of handling. The story had to draw to point in (on an average) two or three hundred lines at most-there are fabliaux of a thousand lines, and fabliaux of thirty or forty, but the average is as just stated. The incidents had to be adjusted for best effect, neither too many nor too few. The treatment had to be mainly provocative-an appeal in some cases by very coarse means indeed to very coarse nerves, in others by finer devices addressed to senses more tickle o' the sere. And so grew up that unsurpassed and hardly matched product the French short story, where, if it is in perfection, hardly a word is thrown away, and not a word missed that is really wanted. The great means for doing this in literature is irony; and irony appears in the fabliaux as it had The appearance hardly done since Lucian. Take, for instance, this opening of a piece, the rest of which is at least as irreverent, considerably less quotable, but not much less pointed: of irony. "Quant Dieus ot estoré lo monde, Si con il est à la reonde, Et quanque il convit dedans, Les chevalers toz asena What two orders were left, and how the difficulty of there being nothing left for them was got over, may be found by the curious in the seventy-sixth fabliau of the third volume of the collection so often quoted. But the citation given will show that there is nothing surprising in the eighteenth-century history, literary or poetical, of a country which could produce such a piece, certainly not later than the thirteenth. Even Voltaire could not put the thing more neatly or with a more complete freedom from superfluous words. It will doubtless have been observed that the fabliau-though the word is simply fabula in one of its regular Romance metamorphoses, Fables proper. and though the method is sufficiently Æsopic-is not a "fable" in the sense more especially assigned to the term. Yet the medieval languages, especially French and Latin, were by no means destitute of fables properly so called. On the contrary, it would appear that it was precisely during our present period that the rather meagre Æsopisings of Phædrus and Babrius were expanded into the fuller collection of beast-stories which exists in various forms, the chief of them being the Ysopet (the name generally given to the class in Romance) of Marie de France, |