but they add nothing to our knowledge of his history, and content themselves with repeating, with more or less detail, that he was young, and that he met his death at the hands of Achilles; it will be sufficient here to quote the passage from Quintus Smyrnæus, who is generally supposed to have lived in the fourth century, A.D.

"Within the sacred walls of Troy, Hecuba brought Troilus into the world, but he remained not long to be an honour to her, for the rude lance and prowess of Achilles deprived him of his life. . . . As in a flowery garden, beside a stream, the sharp scythe comes in search of the yet green ear of corn or of the poppy, and mows them down or ever their fruit be ripened, cutting them off before they come to sweet maturity, not leaving them till the harvest: the smooth steel taking away all hope of the offshoots that the gentle dews had promised in the fulness of time; so did Achilles slay the son of Priam, the godlike Troilus in the flower of his youth, ere he had known the joy of clasping a bride within his arms, and still occupied himself with boyish games. Thus did the Fatal Sister cut the thread just at the time when he was approaching the joyous years of manhood, when the body is full of strength, and the blood of audacity."

With regard to Cressida, Cryseyde, Brisaida, Briséida, the Homeric origin of her name, as has already been remarked, may be sought either in Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, a priest of Apollo, or in Briseis, the "beauteous prize" of Achilles. At the opening of the "Iliad," Chryses comes to ransom his daughter, who has fallen to the lot of Agamemnon after a victorious attack of the Greeks. Agamemnon refuses to accept the proffered ransom, and Apollo, to avenge his priest, smites the Grecian army with a plague. Calchas, encouraged by Achilles, declares that the plague will only cease when Chryseis is given back to her father, and Agamemnon, sorely wounded in his pride, sees himself obliged to restore his fair portion of the booty; but he revenges himself upon Achilles, whom he hates as the instigator of the oracles pronounced by Calchas, by demanding Briseis from him in return.

Those who prize accuracy in even the insignificant details of research, will have the satisfaction further on of being able to decide in favour of Briseis, rather than of Chryseis, as the veritable original of Cressida; but in sooth, it is a matter of little moment, for the story of Shakespeare's coquette is perfectly distinct from that of the two characters in the "Iliad," who remained throughout antiquity as Homer made them from the first.

In the course of the fifth century, or in the beginning of the sixth, the exact date is not known, there appeared a book, the importance of which was without parallel in the literary history of the Middle Ages, and even in that of the Renaissance. The history of the destruction of Troy, "Historia de Excidio Troja," was written by an impostor, whose real name is unknown, but who presented his work as a translation of the writings of a Phrygian priest named Dares, an eyewitness of the Trojan war, who was supposed to have kept a sort of journal of the siege. A little anterior to this, another journal, written during the siege, had been brought to light under the title of "De Bello Trojano," by another impostor, who gave himself out as Dictys the Cretan, another contemporary of the Trojan war, and companion-in-arms to Idomeneus. The pseudo-Dares and the pseudo-Dictys were the greatest and almost only source of all that the Middle Ages knew, and of all that they repeated, concerning the events related in the "Iliad." Homer was forgotten, and his place usurped by these two authors, and for ten or eleven centuries, no really ancient poet, not even Virgil, exercised a greater influence than they did over the imagination of men.

We shall have occasion to return to the fictitious Dares and the fictitious Dictys in the next chapter, when treating of the legends and traditions of the Trojan war

current in the Middle Ages, and even down to the time of Shakespeare. In the present chapter we are merely concerned with the story of Troilus and Cressida, and it is only necessary to cull from the two apocryphal narratives whatever they may contain relating to the two lovers. In future, for the sake of brevity, I shall simply call them Dares and Dictys, without adding any epithet to their names as a reminder that they were not whom they pretended to be. It appears that there really had existed a Dares of Phrygia, a priest of Vulcan, who is mentioned in the fifth book of the "Iliad," and a Dictys of Crete, companion-in-arms to Idomeneus, and there is some reason to believe that they left behind them documents concerning the Trojan war, which Homer afterwards made use of. Ælian states that the writings of Dares (he makes no mention of Dictys) were extant in his day (supposed to be about the middle of the third century of the Christian era), but these writings, which were lost in the general wreck of classical antiquity, were certainly not those which made their appearance in the sixth century.

Troilus is spoken of both by Dares and by Dictys; we will quote Dictys first:

"Lycaon was taken prisoner, as was also Troilus, son of Priam Achilles, enraged at not having yet received the answer he was expecting from Priam, ordered him to be strangled. At the news, the Trojans reflecting on the tender age of Troilus, bewailed his death with tears and great moaning; for the youth, scarcely emerged from boyhood, was beloved by all for his grace and beauty of form, as well as for his modesty and truth of heart."

Dares says that

;

"Troilus was of good stature and of great comeliness, full of courage, and of vigour beyond his years, and impatient to distinguish himself." He adds, "Ulysses and Diomedes said of Troilus, that he was no less valiant than Hector."

We also learn from him that Achilles could only kill

the brave Troilus by attacking him behind, treacherously. Thus we see Troilus beginning to reveal himself and to grow into a man; he is no longer the stripling of classical antiquity, the tender flower cut off before its time. In a council of war held by Priam, he boldly sides with Paris in favour of action and of continuing the war, contesting the point, as in the second act of Shakespeare's play, with Helenus, who advocates a more timorous policy; he is already a hero, but not as yet in love.

From Dictys we learn nothing of Cressida, but Dares, who has a great fondness for describing his personages, has drawn her portrait for us.

"Briséida," he says (and this would seem to decide the knotty point of Cressida's origin in favour of Briseis, the captive of Achilles), "Briséida was of great beauty, tall and white, with light hair,* eyebrows meeting at their birth, most gracious eyes and well-proportioned body; she was sweet and gentle with modesty of heart, and she was simple and pious."

This description is all that we find said about Briséida in Dares. Nothing is told of her relationship to Calchas, nor of the story of her love and her coquettish ways. She is simply Briseis, the captive of Achilles. We may remark in passing, that Dares is the first writer who represents Calchas the priest as a Trojan gone over to the Greeks in consequence of his prophetic spirit, by which he foreknew the fatal future of Troy.

The real originator of the story of Troilus and Cressida was a Norman trouvère, who lived in the latter half of the twelfth century, the classical epoch of what may be called the early French Renaissance in the Middle Ages,

*In the Middle Ages neither man nor woman was considered handsome if they had not light hair. Shakespeare's Pandarus acknowledges with regret that Cressida's hair was a little darker than Helen's. Shakespeare however in his 127th Sonnet, has rehabilitated the brunette type of beauty.

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an epoch when the influence of French literature was paramount in Europe, as again later in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,-less perfect indeed than then, but endowed perhaps with greater freshness and fertility of imagination. Unfortunately, the language of those times, more logical and in certain respects better than the French of the present day, has done more than merely grow old, it has become a dead language that Frenchmen themselves can decipher only with trouble and study. History, however, fills up the blank caused by the absence of direct knowledge and true understanding of the spirit of these medieval works, and teaches us that in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, French literature took the initiative amongst the countries of Europe; Germany, Italy, Spain, and England borrowing largely from it for a considerable space of time.

"There was a tolerably wide interval," writes Littré, in the preface to his "Dictionnaire de la Langue Française," during which France exercised no literary ascendency over the rest of Europe, but it separates two epochs when this ascendency-a more legitimate one than most, because those who submitted to it did so willingly and of their own choice-was all-powerful: the epoch that takes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and that which begins with the century of Louis XIV. . . . In the earlier period, it was the originality of its creations and the perfect harmony between its conceptions and the then prevailing beliefs and manners that recommended French literature to Europe;—in the riper and more cultured age, it was a certain sustained correctness and its perfect elegance, it was the clearness of intellect, and, a little later on, the boldness of its philosophic speculation, that made so many foreign hands seize upon French books."

The Norman trouvère, whose imagination gave birth to the story of Troilus and Cressida was Benoit de SainteMore, and the history of their love forms an episode in a long epic poem entitled "Le Roman de Troie." M. Joly has published the entire poem of Benoit de Sainte-More, adding a work of considerable size and of the highest interest upon the metamorphoses undergone by Homer