r it must once more
be said that the pre-eminence of French over other literatures in this
volume is not due to any crotchet of the writer, or to any desire to
speak of what he has known pretty thoroughly, long, and at first-hand,
in preference to that which he knows less thoroughly, less of old,
and in parts at second-hand. It is the simplest truth to say that in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries France kept the literary school
of Europe, and that, with the single exception of Iceland, during a
part, and only a part, of the time, all the nations of Europe were
content to do, each in its own tongue, and sometimes even in hers, the
lessons which she taught, the exercises which she set them. That the
scholars sometimes far surpassed their masters is quite true, and is
nothing unusual; that they were scholars is simple fact.

[Footnote 70: _Le Roman de Troie._ Par Benoit de Sainte-More. Ed.
Joly. Paris, 1870.]

[Footnote 71: Paris, 1886. The number of monographs on this subject
is, however, very large, and I should like at least to add Mr Wallis
Budge's _Alexander the Great_ (the Syriac version of Callisthenes),
Cambridge, 1889, and his subsequent _Life and Exploits of Alexander_.]

[Sidenote: _Callisthenes._]

The Alexander story, which Mr Wallis Budge, our chief authority (and
perhaps _the_ chief authority) on the Oriental versions of it, speaks
of as "a book which has had more readers than any other, the Bible
alone excepted," is of an antiquity impossible to determine in any
manner at all certain. Nor is the exact place of its origin, or the
language in which it was originally written, to be pronounced upon
with anything like confidence. What does seem reasonably sure is that
what is called "the Pseudo-Callisthenes"--that is to say, the fabulous
biography of the great king, which is certainly the basis of all
Western, and perhaps that of most Eastern, versions of the legend--was
put into Greek at least as early as the third century after Christ,
and thence into Latin (by "Julius Valerius" or another) before the
middle of the fourth. And it appears probable that some of the Eastern
versions, if not themselves the original (and a strong fight has been
made for the AEthiopic or Old-Egyptian origin of nearly the whole),
represent Greek texts older than those we have, as well as in some
cases other Eastern texts which may be older still. Before any modern
Western vernacular handled the subject, there were Alexander l