whom
several died for God; others most strong and hardy, as were Arthur,
Edmund, and Knut."[12]

Rarely was the like seen in any literature; here is a poem dedicated to
a Frenchwoman by a Norman of England, which begins with the praise of a
Briton, a Saxon, and a Dane. The same phenomenon is to be noticed, after
the Conquest in romances, chronicles and histories. Whoever the author
may be, whether of French or English blood, the unity of origin of the
two races receives almost invariably the fullest acknowledgment; the
inhabitants of the great island cease to look towards Germany, Denmark
and Scandinavia, for their ancestors or for the sources of their
inspiration; they look rather, like their new French companions, to
Rome, Greece and Troy. This policy produced not only momentous social
results, but also very important literary consequences; the intellectual
connection with the north being cut off, the Anglo-French allowed
themselves to be drilled with the Latin discipline; the ancient models
ceased to appear to them heterogeneous; they studied them in all good
faith as the works of distant relations, with such result that they,
unlike the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples, were ready, when the time
of the Renaissance came, to benefit by the great intellectual movement
set on foot by southern neo-classic nations; and while Italy produced
Ariosto and Tasso, while Spain possessed Cervantes, and France
Montaigne, Ronsard and Rabelais, they were ready to give birth to the
unparalleled trio of Spenser, Bacon and Shakespeare.

From the fourteenth century this conclusion was easy to foresee; for,
even at that period, England took part in a tentative Renaissance that
preceded the great one of the sixteenth century. At the time when Italy
produced Petrarca and Boccaccio, and France had Froissart, England
produced Chaucer, the greatest of the four.

Famous as Chaucer was as a story-teller, it is strange that he was to
have almost no influence on the development of the novel in England.
When we read of Harry Bailly and the Wife of Bath, of the modest Oxford
clerk and the good parson; when we turn the pages of the inimitable
story of Troilus and the fickle, tender, charming Cressida, it seems as
if nothing was lacking to the production of perfect novels. All the
elements of the art are there complete: the delicate analysis of
passions, the stirring plot, the natural play of various characters, the
very human mixture of grossnes