racteristic poems, half "complaints," half satires, to
this not very auspicious event. For the rest, it is rather conjectured
than known that his life must have filled the greater part, if not the
whole, of the last two-thirds of the thirteenth century, thus
including the dates of both parts of the _Rose_ within it. The
tendencies of the second part of the great poem appear in Ruteboeuf
more distinctly than those of the earlier, though, like both, his work
shows the firm grip which allegory was exercising on all poetry, and
indeed on all literature. He has been already referred to as having
written an outlying "branch" of _Renart_; and not a few of his other
poems--_Le Dit des Cordeliers_, _Frere Denise_, and others--are of the
class of the _Fabliaux_: indeed Ruteboeuf may be taken as the type
and chief figure to us of the whole body of _fabliau_-writing
_trouveres_. Besides the marriage poem, we have others on his personal
affairs, the chief of which is speakingly entitled "La Pauvrete
Ruteboeuf." But he has been even more, and even more justly, prized
as having left us no small number of historical or political poems,
not a few of which are occupied with the decay of the crusading
spirit. The "Complainte d'Outremer," the "Complainte de
Constantinoble," the "Debat du Croise et du Decroise" tell their own
tale, and contain generous, if perhaps not very long-sighted or
practical, laments and indignation over the decadence of adventurous
piety. Others are less religious; but, on the whole, Ruteboeuf, even
in his wilder days, seems to have been (except for that dislike of the
friars, in which he was not alone) a religiously minded person, and we
have a large body of poems, assigned to his later years, which are
distinctly devotional. These deal with his repentance, with his
approaching death, with divers Lives of Saints, &c. But the most
noteworthy of them, as a fresh strand in the rope we are here weaving,
is the Miracle-play of _Theophile_. It will serve as a text or
starting-point on which to take up the subject of the drama itself,
with no more about Ruteboeuf except the observation that the varied
character of his work is no doubt typical of that of at least the
later _trouveres_ generally. They were practically men of letters, not
to say journalists, of all work that was likely to pay; and must have
shifted from romance to drama, from satire to lyric, just as their
audience or their patrons might happen to demand, as