ssigned to Benoit de
Sainte-More. Benoit, whose flourishing time was about 1160, who was a
contemporary and rival of Wace, and who wrote a chronicle of Normandy
even longer than his Troy-book, composed the latter in more than
thirty thousand octosyllabic lines, an expansion of the fifty pages of
Dares, which stands perhaps almost alone even among the numerous
similar feats of mediaeval bards. He has helped himself freely with
matter from Dictys towards the end of his work; but, as we have seen,
even this reinforcement could not be great in bulk. Expansion,
however, so difficult to some writers, was never in the least a
stumbling-block to the _trouvere_. It was rather a bottomless pit into
which he fell, traversing in his fall lines and pages with endless
alacrity of sinning.

Not that Benoit is by any means a person to be contemptuously spoken
of. In the first place, as we shall see presently, he was for many
hundred years completely and rather impudently robbed of his fame; in
the second, he is the literary ancestor of far greater men than
himself; and in the third, his verse, though not free from the
besetting sin of its kind, and especially of the octosyllabic
variety--the sin of smooth but insignificant fluency--is always
pleasant, and sometimes picturesque. Still there is no doubt that at
present the second claim is the strongest with us; and that if Benoit
de Sainte-More had not, through his plagiarist Colonna, been the
original of Boccaccio and Chaucer and Shakespeare, he would require
little more than a bare mention here.

[Sidenote: _The phases of Cressid._]

Dares, as we have seen, mentions Briseida, and extols her beauty and
charm: she was, he says, "beautiful, not of lofty stature, fair, her
hair yellow and silky, her eyebrows joined, her eyes lively, her body
well proportioned, kind, affable, modest, of a simple mind, and
pious." He also mightily extols Troilus; but he does not intimate any
special connection between the two, or tell the story of "Cressid,"
which indeed his followers elaborated in terms not altogether
consistent with some of the above laudatory epithets. Tzetzes, who
with some others gives her the alternative name of Hippodamia, alters
her considerably, and assigns to her tall stature, a white complexion,
black hair, as well as specially comely breasts, cheeks, and nose,
skill in dress, a pleasant smile, but a distinct tendency to
"arrogance." Both these writers, however, with Joseph of