tudied.
He is a powerful satirist, and passages of narrative and description
show that he had a poet's feeling for beauty; he handles the language
with the strength and skill of a master. On the other hand, he lacks
all sense of proportion, and cannot shape an imaginative plan; his
prolixity wearies the reader, and it cannot be denied that as a moral
reformer he sometimes topples into immorality. The success of the
poem was extraordinary, and extended far beyond France. It was
attacked and defended, and up to the time of Ronsard its influence
on the progress of literature--encouraging, as it did, to excess the
art of allegory and personification--if less than has commonly been
alleged, was unquestionably important.

CHAPTER III
DIDACTIC LITERATURE--SERMONS--HISTORY

I
DIDACTIC LITERATURE

The didactic literature, moral and scientific, of the Middle Ages
is abundant, and possesses much curious interest, but it is seldom
original in substance, and seldom valuable from the point of view
of literary style. In great part it is translated or derived from
Latin sources. The writers were often clerks or laymen who had turned
from the vanities of youth--fabliau or romance--and now aimed at
edification or instruction. Science in the hands of the clergy must
needs be spiritualised and moralised; there were sermons to be found
in stones, pious allegories in beast and bird; mystic meanings in
the alphabet, in grammar, in the chase, in the tourney, in the game
of chess. Ovid and Virgil were sanctified to religious uses. The
earliest versified Bestiary, which is also a Volucrary, a Herbary,
and a Lapidary, that of Philippe de Thaon (before 1135), is versified
from the Latin _Physiologus_, itself a translation from the work of
an Alexandrian Greek of the second century. In its symbolic zoology
the lion and the pelican are emblems of Christ; the unicorn is God;
the crocodile is the devil; the stones "turrobolen," which blaze when
they approach each other, are representative of man and woman. A
_Bestiaire d'Amour_ was written by Richard de Fournival, in which
the emblems serve for the interpretation of human love. A Lapidary,
with a medical--not a moral--purpose, by Marbode, Bishop of Rennes,
was translated more than once into French, and had, indeed, an
European fame.

Bestiaries and Lapidaries form parts of the vast encyclopaedias,
numerous in the thirteenth century, which were known by such names
as _Image du Monde_, _