guilty of
cowardice or treachery, follows; and then we return to Tarsus and
Candace, that courteous queen. Meanwhile the traitors Antipater and
"Divinuspater" continue plotting, and though Alexander is warned
against them by his mother Olympias, they succeed in poisoning him.
The death of the king and the regret of his Twelve Peers, to whom he
has distributed his dominions, finish the poem.

[Sidenote: _Form, &c._]

In form this poem resembles in all respects the _chansons de geste_.
It is written in mono-rhymed _laisses_ of the famous metre which owes
its name and perhaps its popularity to the use of it in this romance.
Part of it at least cannot be later than the twelfth century; and
though in so long a poem, certainly written by more than one, and in
all likelihood by more than two, there must be inequality, this
inequality is by no means very great. The best parts of the poem are
the marvels. The fighting is not quite so good as in the _chansons de
geste_ proper; but the marvels are excellent, the poet relating them
with an admirable mixture of gravity and complaisance, in spirited
style and language, and though with extremely little attention to
coherence and verisimilitude, yet with no small power of what may be
called fabulous attraction.

[Sidenote: _Continuations._]

It is also characteristic in having been freely continued. Two
authors, Guy of Cambray and Jean le Nevelois, composed a _Vengeance
Alexandre_. The _Voeux du Paon_, which develop some of the episodes
of the main poem, were almost as famous at the time as _Alixandre_
itself. Here appears the popular personage of Gadiffer, and hence was
in part derived the great prose romance of Perceforest. Less
interesting in itself, but curious as illustrating the tendency to
branch up and down to all parts of a hero's pedigree, is _Florimont_,
a very long octosyllabic poem, perhaps as old as the twelfth century,
dealing with Alexander's grandfather.[79]

[Footnote 79: In this paragraph I again speak at second-hand, for
neither the _Voeux_ nor _Florimont_ is to my knowledge yet in print.
The former seems to have supplied most of the material of the poem in
fifteenth-century Scots, printed by the Bannatyne Club in 1831, and to
be reprinted, in another version, by the Scottish Text Society.]

[Sidenote: King Alexander.]

The principal and earliest version of the English _Alexander_ is
accessible without much difficulty in Weber's _Metrical Romances of
the T