quire, was extolled by his English adapter
as the "flower of them that write in France." But as yet Chaucer's own
tastes, his French blood, if he had any in his veins, and the
familiarity with the French tongue which he had already had
opportunities of acquiring, were more likely to commend to him
productions of broader literary merits and a wider popularity. From
these points of view, in the days of Chaucer's youth, there was no
rival to the "Roman de la Rose," one of those rare works on which the
literary history of whole generations and centuries may be said to
hinge. The Middle Ages, in which from various causes the literary
intercommunication between the nations of Europe was in some respects
far livelier than it has been in later times, witnessed the appearance
of several such works--diverse in kind but similar to one another in
the universality of their popularity: "The Consolation of Philosophy,"
the "Divine Comedy," the "Imitation of Christ," the "Roman de la Rose,"
the "Ship of Fools." The favour enjoyed by the "Roman de la Rose," was
in some ways the most extraordinary of all. In France, this work
remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and "the source whence
every rhymer drew for his needs" down to the period of the classical
revival led by Ronsard (when it was edited by Clement Marot, Spenser's
early model). In England, it exercised an influence only inferior to
that which belonged to it at home upon both the matter and the form of
poetry down to the renascence begun by Surrey and Wyatt. This
extraordinary literary influence admits of a double explanation. But
just as the authorship of the poem was very unequally divided between
two personages, wholly divergent in their purposes as writers, so the
POPULARITY of the poem is probably in the main to be attributed to the
second and later of the pair.

To the trouvere Guillaume de Lorris (who took his name from a small
town in the valley of the Loire) was due the original conception of the
"Roman de la Rose," for which it is needless to suspect any extraneous
source. To novelty of subject he added great ingenuity of treatment.
Instead of narrative of warlike adventures he offered to his readers a
psychological romance, in which a combination of symbolisations and
personified abstractions supplied the characters of the moral conflict
represented. Bestiaries and Lapidaries had familiarised men's minds
with the art of finding a symbolical significan