"[4] the first epic, the most ancient history,
and the oldest English romance. In it, truth is mingled with fiction;
besides the wonders performed by the hero, a destroyer of monsters, we
find a great battle mentioned by Gregory of Tours, where the Frenchmen,
that were to be, cut to pieces the Englishmen that were to be; the first
act of that bloody tragedy continued afterwards at Hastings, Crecy,
Agincourt, Fontenoy, and Waterloo.

The battle of Hastings which made England subject to men from France
resulted in a complete transformation of the literature of the Teutonic
inhabitants of the island. Anglo-Saxon literature had had moments of
brilliance at the time of Alfred, and afterwards at that of Saint
Dunstan; then it had fallen into decay. By careful search, accents of
joy, though of strange character, may be discovered in the texts which
now represent that ancient literature. Taking it as a whole, however,
this literature was sad; a cloud of melancholy enveloped it, like those
penetrating mists, observed by Pytheas and the oldest travellers, which
rose from the marshes of the island and concealed the outlines of its
impenetrable forests. But the conquerors who came from Normandy, from
Brittany, from Anjou, from all the provinces of France, were of a
cheerful temperament; they were happy: everything went well with them.
They brought with them the gaiety, the wit, the sunshine of the south,
uniting the spirit of the Gascon with the tenacity of the Norman. Noisy
and great talkers, when once they became masters of the country, they
straightway put an end to the already dying literature of the conquered
race and substituted their own. God forbid that they should listen to
the lamentations of the Anglo-Saxon mariner or traveller! They had no
concern with their miserable dirges. "Long live Christ who loves the
French!"[5] Even in the laws and religion of the French there now and
then appeared marks of their irrepressible _entrain_. Shall we not,
then, find it in their stories?

The new-comers liked tales of two kinds. First, they delighted in
stories of chivalry, where they found marvellous exploits differing
little from their own. They had seen the son of Herleva, a tanner's
daughter of Falaise, win a kingdom in a battle, in course of which the
cares of a conqueror had not prevented him from making jokes. When,
therefore, they wrote a romance, they might well attribute extraordinary
adventures and rare courage to Roland,