d. Meyer, _op. cit._, i. 1-9.]

[Footnote 76: Ll. 27-30.]

But the fragment is unluckily so short (105 lines only) that it is
impossible to say much of its matter.

[Sidenote: _The decasyllabic poem._]

Between this and the Alexandrine poem there is another version,[77]
curiously intermediate in form, date, and substance. This is in the
ordinary form of the older, but not oldest, _chansons de geste_,
decasyllabic rhymed _tirades_. There are only about eight hundred
lines of it, which have been eked out, by about ten thousand
Alexandrines from the later and better known poem, in the MSS. which
remain. The decasyllabic part deals with the youth of Alexander, and
though the author does not seem, any more than Alberic, to have
admitted the scandal about Nectanabus, the death of that person is
introduced, and altogether we see a Callisthenic influence. The piece
has been very highly praised for literary merit; it seems to me
certainly not below, but not surprisingly above, the average of the
older _chansons_ in this respect. But in so much of the poem as
remains to us no very interesting part of the subject is attacked.

[Footnote 77: Meyer, i. 25-59.]

The great romance is in more fortunate conditions. We have it not
indeed complete (for it does not go to the death of the hero) but in
ample measure: and fortunately it has for full half a century been
accessible to the student. When M. Paul Meyer says that this edition
"ne saurait fournir une base suffisante a une etude critique sur le
roman d'Alixandre," he is of course using the word _critique_ with the
somewhat arbitrary limitations of the philological specialist. The
reader who cares for literature first of all--for the book as a book
to read--will find it now complete for his criticism in the Stuttgart
version of the _Alixandre_, though he cannot be too grateful to M.
Meyer for his second volume as a whole, and for the printing in the
first of Alberic, and the decasyllabic poem, and for the extracts from
that of Thomas of Kent, who, unlike the authors of the great Romance,
admitted the Nectanabus marvels and intrigues.

[Sidenote: _The great_ Roman d'Alixandre.]

The story is of such importance in mediaeval literature that some
account of the chief English and French embodiments of it may be
desirable. The French version, attributed in shares, which have as
usual exercised the adventurous ingenuity of critics, to two authors,
Lambert li Tors, the Crooked (the