ferocity,
which, unluckily, the study of _belles lettres_ does not seem very
appreciably to soften. Assisted by the usual fallacy of antedating
MSS. in the early days of palaeographic study, and by their
prepossessions as Germans, some early students of the Reynard story
made out much too exclusive and too early claims, as to possession by
right of invention, for the country in which Reynard has no doubt, for
the last four centuries or so, been much more of a really popular hero
than anywhere else. Investigation and comparison, however, have had
more healing effects here than in other cases; and since the
acknowledgment of the fact that the very early Middle High German
version of Henry the Glichezare, itself of the end of the twelfth
century, is a translation from the French, there has not been much
serious dispute about the order of the Reynard romances as we actually
have them. That is to say, if the Latin _Isengrimus_--the oldest
_Reinardus Vulpes_--of 1150 or thereabouts is actually the oldest
_text_, the older branches of the French _Renart_ pretty certainly
come next, with the High German following a little later, and the Low
German _Reincke de Vos_ and the Flemish _Reinaert_ a little later
still. The Southern Romance nations do not seem--indeed the humour is
essentially Northern--to have adopted Reynard with as much enthusiasm
as they showed towards the Romances; and our English forms were
undoubtedly late adaptations from foreign originals.

[Sidenote: _Place of origin._]

If, however, this account of the texts may be said to be fairly
settled, the same cannot of course be said as to the origin of the
story. Here there are still champions of the German claim, whose
number is increased by those who stickle for a definite "Low" German
origin. Some French patriots, with a stronger case than they generally
have, still maintain the story to be purely French in inception. I
have not myself seen any reason to change the opinion I formed some
fifteen years ago, to the effect that it seems likely that the
original language of the epic is French, but French of a Walloon or
Picard dialect, and that it was written somewhere between the Seine
and the Rhine.

The character and accomplishment of the story, however, are matters of
much more purely literary interest than the rather barren question of
the probable--it is not likely that it will ever be the proved--date
or place of origin of this famous thing. The fable in ge