Si con il est a la reonde,
Et quanque il convit dedans,
Trois ordres establir de genz,
Et fist el siecle demoranz
Chevalers, clers et laboranz.
Les chevalers toz asena
As terres, et as clers dona
Les aumosnes et les dimages;
Puis asena les laborages
As laborenz, por laborer.
Qant ce ot fet, sanz demeler
D'iluec parti, et s'en ala."

What two orders were left, and how the difficulty of there being
nothing left for them was got over, may be found by the curious in the
seventy-sixth _fabliau_ of the third volume of the collection so often
quoted. But the citation given will show that there is nothing
surprising in the eighteenth-century history, literary or poetical, of
a country which could produce such a piece, certainly not later than
the thirteenth. Even Voltaire could not put the thing more neatly or
with a more complete freedom from superfluous words.

[Sidenote: _Fables proper._]

It will doubtless have been observed that the _fabliau_--though the
word is simply _fabula_ in one of its regular Romance metamorphoses,
and though the method is sufficiently AEsopic--is not a "fable" in the
sense more especially assigned to the term. Yet the mediaeval
languages, especially French and Latin, were by no means destitute of
fables properly so called. On the contrary, it would appear that it
was precisely during our present period that the rather meagre
AEsopisings of Phaedrus and Babrius were expanded into the fuller
collection of beast-stories which exists in various forms, the chief
of them being the _Ysopet_ (the name generally given to the class in
Romance) of _Marie de France_, the somewhat later _Lyoner Ysopet_ (as
its editor, Dr Foerster, calls it), and the original of this latter,
the Latin elegiacs of the so-called _Anonymus Neveleti_.[137] The
collection of Marie is interesting, at least, because of the author,
whose more famous Lais, composed, it would seem, at the Court of Henry
III. of England about the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, and forming a sort of offshoot less of the substance of the
Arthurian story than of its spirit, are among the most delightful
relics of mediaeval poetry. But the Lyons book perhaps exhibits more of
the characteristic which, evident enough in the _fabliau_ proper,
discovers, after passing as by a channel through the beast-fable, its
fullest and most famous form in the world-renowned _Romance of Reynard
the Fo