onal and religious ideal arose. Epic heroes--Clovis,
Clotaire, Dagobert, Charles Martel--became centres for the popular
imagination; an echo of the Dagobert songs is found in _Floovent_,
a poem of the twelfth century; eight Latin lines, given in the _Vie
de Saint Faron_ by Helgaire, Bishop of Meaux, preserve, in their
ninth-century rendering, a fragment of the songs which celebrated
Clotaire II. Doubtless more and more in these lost _cantilenes_ the
German element yielded to the French, and finally the two streams
of literature--French and German--separated; gradually, also, the
lyrical element yielded to the epic, and the _chanson de geste_ was
developed from these songs.

In Charlemagne, champion of Christendom against Islam, a great epic
figure appeared; on his person converged the epic interest; he may
be said to have absorbed into himself, for the imagination of the
singers and the people, the persons of his predecessors, and even,
at a later time, of his successors; their deeds became his deeds,
their fame was merged in his; he stood forth as the representative
of France. We may perhaps regard the ninth century as the period of
the transformation of the _cantilenes_ into the _chansons de geste_;
in the fragment of Latin prose of the tenth century--reduced to prose
from hexameters, but not completely reduced--discovered at La Haye
(and named after the place of its discovery), is found an epic episode
of Carlovingian war, probably derived from a _chanson de geste_ of
the preceding century. In each _chanson_ the _gesta_,[1] the deeds
or achievements of a heroic person, are glorified, and large as may
be the element of invention in these poems, a certain historical basis
or historical germ may be found, with few exceptions, in each. Roland
was an actual person, and a battle was fought at Roncevaux in 778.
William of Orange actually encountered the Saracens at Villedaigne
in 793. Renaud de Montauban lived and fought, not indeed against
Charlemagne, but against Charles Martel. Ogier, Girard de Roussillon,
Raoul de Cambrai, were not mere creatures of the fancy. Even when
the narrative records no historical series of events, it may express
their general significance, and condense into itself something of
the spirit of an epoch. In the course of time, however, fantasy made
a conquest of the historical domain; a way for the triumph of fantasy
had been opened by the incorporation of legend into the narrative,
with all its w