oomy and impious despair and indifference to
good living and even life, of which sloth itself is but a partial
result.]

[Sidenote: _William of Lorris and Jean de Meung._]

When William of Lorris, probably at some time in the fourth decade of
the thirteenth century, set to work to write the _Romance of the
Rose_, he adjusted this allegorical handling to the purposes of
love-poetry with an ingenious intricacy never before attained. It has
been the fashion almost ever since the famous Romance was rescued from
the ignorant and contemptuous oblivion into which it had fallen, to
praise Jean de Meung's part at the expense of that due to William of
Lorris. But this is hard to justify either on directly aesthetic or on
historical principles of criticism. In the first place, there can be
no question that, vitally as he changed the spirit, Jean de Meung was
wholly indebted to his predecessor for the form--the form of
half-pictorial, half-poetic allegory, which is the great
characteristic of the poem, and which gave it the enormous attraction
and authority that it so long possessed. In the second place, clever
as Jean de Meung is, and more thoroughly in harmony as he may be with
the _esprit gaulois_, his work is on a much lower literary level than
that of his predecessor. Jean de Meung in the latter and larger part
of the poem simply stuffs into it stock satire on women, stock
learning, stock semi-pagan morality. He is, it is true, tolerably
actual; he shares with the _fabliau_-writers and the authors of
_Renart_ a firm grasp on the perennial rascalities and meannesses of
human nature. The negative commendation that he is "no fool" may be
very heartily bestowed upon him. But he is a little commonplace and
more than a little prosaic. There is amusement in him, but no charm:
and where (that is to say, in large spaces) there is no amusement,
there is very little left. Nor, except for the inappropriate
exhibition of learning and the strange misuse of poetical (at least of
verse) allegory, can he be said to be eminently characteristic of his
own time. His very truth to general nature prevents that; while his
literary ability, considerable as it is, is hardly sufficient to
clothe his universally true reflections in a universally acceptable
form.

[Sidenote: _The first part._]

The first four thousand and odd lines of the Romance, on the other
hand--for beyond them it is known that the work of William of Lorris
does not go--contain