oza, in vento, e in neve,
Perche havom fato cosi gran pecca.

This feeling is exactly analogous to that existing nowadays in
semi-barbarous countries against the Jews. The idle hated the
industrious, and hated them all the more when their industry brought
them any profit.]

Yet not so; I can recall one, though only one, occasion in which
mediaeval literature shows us the serf. The place is surely the most
unexpected, the charming thirteenth century tale of "Aucassin et
Nicolette." In his beautiful essay upon that story, Mr. Pater has
deliberately omitted this episode, which is indeed like a spot of
blood-stained mud upon some perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver
ground. It is a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and
unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of almost childish
love, the love of the beautiful son of the lord of Beaucaire for a
beautiful Saracen slave girl. For, although Aucassin and Nicolette are
often separated, and always disconsolate--she in her wonderfully
frescoed vaulted room, he in his town prison--there is always
surrounding them a sort of fairy land of trees and flowers, a constant
song of birds; although they wander through the woods and tear their
delicate skin, and catch their hair in brambles and briars, we have
always the sense of the daisies bending beneath their tread, of the
green leaves rustling aside from their heads covered with hair--"blond
et menu crespele." Their very hardships are lovely, like the hut of
flowering branches and grapes, which Nicolette builds for herself, and
through whose fissures the moonlight shines and the little stars
twinkle: so much so, that when they weep, these two beautiful and dainty
creatures, we listen as if to singing, and with no more sense of grief
than at some pathetic little snatch of melody. And in the midst of this
idyl of lovely things; in the midst of all these delicate patternings,
whose minuteness and faint tint merge into one vague pleasurable
impression; stands out, unintentionally placed there by the author,
little aware of its terrible tragic realism, the episode which I am
going to translate.

"Thus Aucassin wandered all day through the forest, without hearing
any news of his sweet love; and when he saw that dusk was
spreading, he began bitterly to weep. As he was riding along an old
road, where weeds and grass grew thick and high, he suddenly saw
before him, in the middle