t makes the poem, or collection of poems, so remarkable. It
is hard, coarse, prosaic except for the range and power of its fancy,
libellous enough on humanity from behind its stalking-brutes. But it
is true, if an exaggeration of the truth; and its constant hugging of
the facts of life supplies the strangest possible contrast to the
graceful but shadowy land of romance which we have left in former
chapters. We all know the burial-scene of Launcelot--later, no doubt,
in its finest form, but in suggestion and spirit of the time with
which we are dealing. Let us now consider briefly the burial-scene of
Renart.

[Sidenote: _The burial of Renart._]

When Meon, the excellent first editor of the collection, put, as was
reason, the branch entitled "La Mort Renart" last, he was a little
troubled by the consideration that several of the beasts whom in
former branches Renart himself has brought to evil ends reappear and
take part in his funeral. But this scarcely argued a sufficient
appreciation of the true spirit of the cycle. The beasts, though
perfectly lively abstractions, are, after all, abstractions in a way,
and you cannot kill an abstraction. Nay, the author, with a really
grand final touch of the pervading satire which is the key of the
whole, gives us to understand at the last that Renart (though he has
died not once, but twice, in the course of the _fytte_) is not really
dead at all, and that when Dame Hermeline persuades the complaisant
ambassadors to report to the Lion-King that they have seen the tomb
with Renart inscribed upon it, the fact was indeed true but the
meaning false, inasmuch as it was another Renart altogether. Indeed
the true Renart is clearly immortal.

Nevertheless, as it is his mission, and that of his poets, to satirise
all the things of Life, so must Death also be satirised in his person
and with his aid. The branch, though it is probably not a very early
one, is of an admirable humour, and an uncompromising truth after a
fashion, which makes the elaborate realism and pessimism of some other
periods look singularly poor, thin, and conventional. The author, for
the keeping of his story, begins by showing the doomed fox more than a
little "failed"--the shadow of fate dwelling coldly beforehand on him.
He is badly mauled at the opening (though, it is true, he takes
vengeance for it) by monks whose hen-roost he is robbing, and when he
meets Coart the hare, _sur son destrier_, with a _vilain_ whom he