to the conventional cycles. These are not true epics, but parodies. How little they are animated by the spirit of chivalry may be inferred from the circumstance that in them sentiments are avowed that would have ravished the heart of Cobbler Simon. Thus Baudouin de Seboure explains:

"Car trestous venons d'Eve, notre père fu Adans.
Il n'est nul gentis; nul homme n'est vilain."

It is the same with Hugues Capet:

"Dieu est tout rassotis qu'ainsi avance un homme."

Nor do morals fare better than religion. In Tristan de Nanteuil 2 Blanchardine, Tristan's mistress, accompanies her lover disguised as a knight"par jour est chevalier, par nuit la mariée." A Mohammedan princess falls in love with the pretended knight, who is already a mother, and Blanchardine, spite of all attempts at evasion, is compelled to wed the lady now converted to Christianity. Naturally she falls into sore perplexity as to how to discharge her marital duties, but, ere it is too late, is miraculously transformed into a man. Instead of Blanchardine she becomes Blanchardin, and lives happily with her wife Clarinde, by whom she has several children.

The best of the set is Baudouin de Sebourc,3 and the

1 On this point critics are not absolutely at one. Hugues Capet, at any rate, is open to grave suspicion.

2 See Jahrbuch für rom. und eng. Literatur, ix. p. 366.

3 Li Romans de Baudouin de Sebourc, Valenciennes, 1841.

the Mountain.

best thing in Baudouin de Seboure is the episode of the The Old Man of Old Man of the Mountain, which is full of delightful irony. "Would you see wonders?" he says to the kings, Baudouin, Polibans, and the Khalif of Baudas, who visit him, and calling up one of his subjects, signs to him to fling himself down. The Hautassis complies, and is dashed to pieces. Five others immolate themselves in like manner, to the dismay of Baudouin. The Khalif, however, expresses becoming admiration, and the guests are then conducted to a garden flowing with wine and honey. In the midst sits Ivorine, the Old Man's daughter, in a baldachin; and with her are two hundred damsels singing melodiously. Ivorine has never yet smiled on mortal man, waiting indeed for the flower of knighthood. Her father, who has his eye on one of the Saracen visitors, tries to coax her:

“Dame, vechi trois prinches corageus et hardis:
En i a nul des trois, doche fille gentis,

Par coi vos coers puist estre de joie rasouffis?"

The lovely creature allows that this is so, and Baudouin, who could not have held his tongue for all the gold of Paris, inquires if he is the lucky man. Ivorine, smiling on him, replies that he is her friend. "Par Dieu," quoth Baudouin, "s'ai bel joëil conquis." The Old Man, however, is not so well pleased, regarding Baudouin as the least worthy of the three. But worse is to follow. Ivorine, the reverse of dutiful, pours scorn on her father for having begotten her, seeing that she was to be the cause of his ruin. More

over, he is a heretic and believes in the Devil, while she has been soundly converted to the faith. Finally, she offers him the choice of two things, either to believe or to be slain. The Old Man, very wroth, orders the Khalif to kill his daughter, but the Khalif, despising his threats, draws a large knife and stabs the Old Man in the belly.

Cyclical poems.

Old men's tales are not only genealogical, redounding to the credit, or otherwise, of somebody's father or grandfather, but they are wont to be inordinately spun out. This frailty is reflected in the last state of the mediaval epic. Literary old age, unable to produce fresh masterpieces, revels in encyclopædic compilations. The Entrée de Spagne, for instance, is a hash of Roland, Ferragus, and the Prise de Nobles, very long (especially if we include the sequel), but by no means deficient in imagination or power of expression. This epic belongs to a class of poems composed in the north of Italy rather as rivals than as reproductions of native French verse, and merits, if only for this reason, particular attention.

Franco-Italian

epics.

Intellectually, Northern or "High" Italy was the "Italia irredenta" of the close of the Middle Age. The long array of trovatori, with Sordello at their head, poetising in the Provençal tongue, found in Lombardy their chief home and sphere. There also flourished a learned Latin literature which, in several not unimportant points, forestalled the classical revival inaugurated by Petrarch and Boccaccio. The North-French epic was transferred,

not merely as matière, but organically, to the same hospitable region, where, it is hardly too much to say, it enjoyed a second summer. The cultivation of this art takes different forms, and presents in the various specimens different degrees of perfection, but in all are discoverable native elements, not always of the same kind, attesting the nationality of the cultivators. In the Italian MSS. of Aliscans and Aspremont, preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana at Venice, the text is disfigured by Italian dialectal peculiarities, while Gui de Nanteuil contains an introduction of a thousand lines, for which the responsibility rests entirely with the copyist.

Spagne.

The Entrée de Spagne 1 belongs to the later type of French chansons, of which Huon de Bordeaux may be The Entrée de taken as a sample, and which exhibits a blending of the spirit of the Crusades with the Arthurian legends. Roland, without his uncle's knowledge, storms the city of Nobles, and on his return is cuffed by the indignant Charlemagne. Stung by this insult, Roland quits the camp and travels in Persia and the Holy Land. He performs all manner of doughty deeds, and converts heathen Soldans to Christianity. In the desert he is warned by a hermit, whom an angel has inspired to this effect, that he has seven years yet to live, that he is destined to conquer Spain, and finally to die by the hand of a traitor. The

1 A full account of the Entrée de Spagne is given by Gautier in Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes, 4th series, vol. iv. p. 217, &c.; the Prise de Pampelune has been published by Mussafia in Altfranzösische Gedichte aus Venetian. HSS., Vienna, 1864.

Italian authorship is betrayed in the episode of Roland's visit to Rome, where he receives from the Pope an army of twenty thousand warriors; and these he leads in battle as a Roman senator.

Turning to the sister epic, the Prise de Pampelune, the title is not very happily chosen, inasmuch as only The Prise de the commencement of the poem is occupied Pampelune. with this incident, and the commencement, it happens, has been lost. The propriety of the title may be debated the more freely, as it was bestowed in quite modern times by Michelant. Although not by the same hand, it is practically a continuation of the Entrée de Spagne, and its theme is the capture of several towns, not merely that of Pampeluña. The work is much inferior to its predecessor. Very wordy, and altogether lacking in freshness, artistically it is little better than a rhyming chronicle, while of no value as a record of facts. The prominence of Desirier (Desiderio), who in the purely French chansons has no share in the conquest of Spain, is an evidence of the writer's Lombard origin. Desirier is the hero of the Prise de Pampelune; and when he comes to ask a favour of the emperor, he craves that the Lombards may ever retain their freedom, and that any Lombard, irrespective of birth, may have power to become a knight.

The same actors figure in both poems, and of these one now assumes an importance destined to be perpetuated in Italian epics of chivalry. This Estout. is Estout, the wag or humorist of the companionship of Charlemagne. Whimsical as he is,