le work; and its two component parts are
distinguished from one another by a singular change of tone and
temper. It is the later and larger part of the _Rose_ which brings it
close to _Renart_: the smaller and earlier is conceived in a spirit
entirely different, though not entirely alien, and one which,
reinforcing the satiric drift of the _fabliaux_ and _Renart_ itself,
influenced almost the entire literary production in _belles lettres_
at least, and sometimes out of them, for more than two centuries
throughout Europe.

[Footnote 142: Ed. Michel. Paris, 1864. One of the younger French
scholars, who, under the teaching of M. Gaston Paris, have taken in
hand various sections of mediaeval literature, M. Langlois, has
bestowed much attention on the _Rose_, and has produced a monograph on
it, _Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose_. Paris, 1890.]

At no time probably except in the Middle Ages would Jean de Meung, who
towards the end of the thirteenth century took up the scheme which
William of Lorris had left unfinished forty years earlier, have
thought of continuing the older poem instead of beginning a fresh one
for himself. And at no other time probably would any one, choosing to
make a continuation, have carried it out by putting such entirely
different wine into the same bottle. Of William himself little is
known, or rather nothing, except that he must have been, as his
continuator certainly was, a native of the Loire district; so that the
_Rose_ is a product of Central, not, like _Renart_, of Northern
France, and exhibits, especially in the Lorris portion, an
approximation to Provencal spirit and form.

The use of personification and abstraction, especially in relation to
love-matters, had not been unknown in the troubadour poetry itself and
in the northern verse, lyrical and other, which grew up beside or in
succession to it. It rose no doubt partly, if not wholly, from the
constant habit in sermons and theological treatises of treating the
Seven Deadly Sins and other abstractions as entities. Every devout or
undevout frequenter of the Church in those times knew "Accidia"[143]
and Avarice, Anger and Pride, as bodily rather than ghostly enemies,
furnished with a regular uniform, appearing in recognised
circumstances and companies, acting like human beings. And these were
by no means the only sacred uses of allegory.

[Footnote 143: "Sloth" is a rather unhappy substitute for _Accidia_
([Greek: akedeia]), the gl