on
of the writer's daughters, and the _Menagier de Paris_, a treatise
on domestic economy, written by a Parisian bourgeois for the use of
his young wife.]

Among the preacher poets of the thirteenth century the most
interesting personally is the minstrel RUTEBEUF, who towards the
close of his gay though ragged life turned to serious thoughts, and
expressed his penitent feelings with penetrating power. Rutebeuf,
indeed--the Villon of his age--deployed his vivid and ardent powers
in many directions, as a writer of song and satire, of allegory, of
fabliaux, of drama. On each and all he impressed his own personality;
the lyric note, imaginative fire, colour, melody, these were gifts
that compensated the poet's poverty, his conjugal miseries, his lost
eye, his faithless friends, his swarming adversaries. The
personification of vices and virtues, occasional in the _Besant_ and
other poems, becomes a system in the _Songe d'Enfer_, a pilgrim's
progress to hell, and the _Voie de Paradis_, a pilgrim's progress
to heaven, by Raoul de Houdan (after 1200). The _Pelerinage de la
Vie Humaine_--another "way to Paradise"; the _Pelerinage de
l'Ame_--a vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven; and the _Pelerinage
de Jesus-Christ_--a narrative of the Saviour's life, by Guillaume
de Digulleville (fourteenth century), have been imagined by some to
have been among the sources of Bunyan's allegories. Human life may
be represented in one aspect as a pilgrimage; in another it is a
knightly encounter; there is a great strife between the powers of
good and evil; in _Le Tornoiement Antecrist_, by Huon de Meri, Jesus
and the Knights of the Cross, among whom, besides St. Michael, St.
Gabriel, Confession, Chastity, and Alms, are Arthur, Launcelot, and
Gawain, contend against Antichrist and the infernal barons--Jupiter,
Neptune, Beelzebub, and a crowd of allegorical personages. But the
battles and _debats_ of a chivalric age were not only religious; there
are battles of wine and water, battles of fast and feasting, battles
of the seven arts. A disputation between the body and the soul, a
favourite subject for separate treatment by mediaeval poets, is found
also in one of the many sermons in verse; the _Debat des Trois Morts
et des Trois Vifs_ recalls the subject of the memorable painting in
the Campo Santo at Pisa.

II
SERMONS

The Latin sermons of the Middle Ages were countless; but it is not
until Gerson and the close of the fourteenth century t