s portrayal in fiction; the wonderful
passage, culminating in a more wonderful single line,[69] of that
Dunfermline schoolmaster whom some inconceivable person has declared
to be only a poet to "Scotch patriotism"; the great gnomic verses of
Shakespeare's Ulysses, and the various, unequal, sometimes almost
repulsive, never otherwise than powerful, pageantry of that play,
which has been perhaps more misjudged than any other of
Shakespeare's,--all these spring from the Tale of Troy, not in the
least as handed down by the ancients, but tricked and frounced as the
Middle Age was wont. Nor is this half-borrowed interest by any means
the only one. The Cressid story, indeed, does not reach its full
attraction as a direct subject of literary treatment till the
fourteenth century. But the great Alexander cycle gives us work which
merely as poetry equals all but the very best mediaeval work, and its
importance in connection with the famous metre named from it is of
itself capital.

[Footnote 69:

"Than upon him scho kest up baith her ene,
And with ane blunk it came in to his thocht,
That he sumtyme hir face before had sene.

* * * * *

Ane sparke of lufe than till his hart culd spring,
And kendlit all his bodie in ane fyre
With heit fevir, ane sweit and trimbilling
Him tuik quhile he was readie to expire;
To beir his scheild his breast began to tyre:
Within ane quhyle he changit mony hew,
_And nevertheles not ane ane uther knew_."

Laing's _Poems of Henryson_ (Edinburgh, 1865), p. 93. This volume is
unfortunately not too common; but 'The Testament and Complaint of
Cressid' may also be found under Chaucer in Chalmers's Poets (i. 298
for this passage).]

[Sidenote: _The Alexandreid._]

In interest, bulk, and importance these two stories--the Story of the
Destruction of Troy and the Alexandreid--far outstrip all the other
romances of antiquity; they are more accessible than the rest, and
have been the subject of far more careful investigation by modern
students. Little has been added, or is likely to be added, in regard
to the Troy-books generally, since M. Joly's introduction to Benoit's
_Roman de Troie_ six-and-twenty years ago,[70] and it is at least
improbable that much will be added to M. Paul Meyer's handling of the
old French treatments of the Alexandreid in his _Alexandre le Grand
dans la Litterature Francaise au Moyen Age_.[71] Fo