had his
twelve peers; and he also had a horn, through which he gave the word of
command, which took sixty men to blow it, and was heard sixty
miles,--being the same horn which afterwards Orlando sounded at
Roncesvalles. That great career which was one of the epochs of
mankind,--which carried in its victorious march the Greek language and
Greek civilization,--which at the time enlarged the geography of the
world, and opened the way to India,--was overlaid by an incongruous mass
of fable and anachronism, so that the real story was lost. Times,
titles, and places were confounded. Monks and convents, churches and
confessors, were mixed with the achievements of the hero; and in an
early Spanish History of Alexander, by John Lorenzo, we meet such
characters as Don Phoebus, the Emperor Jupiter, and the Count Don
Demosthenes; and we are assured that the mother of Alexander fled to a
convent of Benedictine nuns.

Philip Gaultier, With all his genius, has his incongruities and
anachronisms; but his poem is founded substantially upon the History of
Quintus Curtius, which he has done into Latin hexameters, with the
addition of long speeches and some few inventions. Aristotle is
represented with a hideous exterior, face and body lean, hair neglected,
and the air of a pedant exhausted by study. The soldiers of Alexander
are called _Quirites_, as if they were Romans. The month of June in
Greece is described as if it were in Rome:--

"Mensis erat, cujus juvenum de nimine nomen."

Events connected with the passion of Jesus Christ are treated as having
already passed in the time of Alexander.

The poem is divided into ten books,[55] and the ten initial letters of
these books, when put together like an acrostic, spell the name of the
Archbishop, _Guillermus_, the equivalent for William at that time, who
was the patron of the poet. Besides this conceit, there is a dedication
both at the beginning and at the end. Quantity, especially in Greek or
Asiatic words, is disregarded; and there are affectations in style, of
which the very beginning is an instance:--

"_Gesta_ ducis Macedum totum _digesta_ per orbem
Musa, refer."

In the same vein is the verse,--

"Inclitus ille Clitus," etc.;

and another verse, describing the violence of the soldiers after
victory:--

"Extorquent torques, et inaures perdidit auris."

A rapid analysis of the poem will at least exhibit the order of the
events it narrates, and its to