rose, he is driven back by Danger and
his companions, the guardians of the blossom. Raison descends from
a tower and discourses against the service of Love; Ami offers his
consolations; at length the lover is again admitted to the flowery
precinct, finds his rosebud half unclosed, and obtains the joy of
a kiss. But Jealousy raises an unscalable wall around the rose; the
serviceable Bel-Accueil is imprisoned, and with a long lament of the
lover, the poem (line 4068) closes.

Did Guillaume de Lorris ever complete his poem, or did he die while
it was still but half composed? We may conjecture that it wanted little
to reach some denouement--perhaps the fulfilment of the lover's
hopes; and it is not impossible that a lost fragment actually brought
the love-tale to its issue. But even if the story remained without
an end, we possess in Guillaume's poem a complete mediaeval Art of
Love; and if the amorous metaphysics are sometimes cold, conventional,
or laboured, we have gracious allegories, pieces of brilliant
description, vivid personifications, and something of ingenious
analysis of human passion. Nevertheless the work of this Middle-Age
disciple of Ovid and of Chretien de Troyes owes more than half its
celebrity to the continuation, conceived in an entirely opposite
spirit, by his successor, Jean de Meun.

The contrast is striking: Guillaume de Lorris was a refined and
graceful exponent of the conventional doctrine of love, a seemly
celebrant in the cult of woman, an ingenious decorator of accepted
ideas; Jean de Meun was a passionate and positive spirit, an ardent
speculator in social, political, and scientific questions, one who
cared nothing for amorous subtleties, and held woman in scorn.
Guillaume addressed an aristocratic audience, imbued with the
sentiments of chivalry; Jean was a bourgeois, eager to instruct, to
arouse, to inflame his fellows in a multitude of matters which
concerned the welfare of their lives. He was little concerned for
the lover and his rose, but was deeply interested in the condition
of society, the corruptions of religion, the advance of knowledge.
He turned from ideals which seemed spurious to reason and to nature;
he had read widely in Latin literature, and found much that suited
his mood and mind in Boethius' _De Consolatione Philosophiae_ and
in the _De Planctu Naturae_ of the "universal doctor" of the twelfth
century, Alain de Lille, from each of which he conveyed freely into
his poem