for drama
which characterises the French people, and the keen literary sense and
craft which characterised the French _trouveres_ of the thirteenth
century.

[Sidenote: _Adam de la Halle._]

The honour of producing the first examples known to us is assigned to
Adam de la Halle, a _trouvere_ of Arras, who must have been a pretty
exact contemporary of Ruteboeuf, and who besides some lyrical work
has left us two plays, _Li Jus de la Feuillie_ and _Robin et
Marion_.[154] The latter, as its title almost sufficiently indicates,
is a dramatised _pastourelle_; the former is less easy to classify,
but it stands in something like the same relation to the personal
poems, of which, as has just been mentioned in the case of Ruteboeuf
himself, the _trouveres_ were so fond. For it introduces himself, his
wife (at least she is referred to), his father, and divers of his
Arras friends. And though rough in construction, it is by no means a
very far-off ancestor of the comedy of manners in its most developed
form.

[Footnote 154: Besides the issue above noted these have been
separately edited by A. Rambeau. Marburg, 1886.]

[Sidenote: Robin et Marion.]

It may be more interesting to give some account here of these two
productions, the parents of so numerous and famous a family, than to
dwell on the early miracle plays, which reached their fullest
development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and then for
the most part died away. The play (_Jeu_ is the general term, and the
exact, though now in French obsolete, equivalent of the English word)
of _Robin et Marion_ combines the general theme of the earlier lyric
_pastourelle_, as explained above, with the more general pastoral
theme of the love of shepherd and shepherdess. The scene opens on
Marion singing to the burden "Robins m'a demandee, si m'ara." To her
the Knight, who inquires the meaning of her song, whereupon she avows
her love for Robin. Nevertheless he woos her, in a fashion rather
clumsy than cavalier, but receives no encouragement. Robin comes up
after the Knight's departure. He is, to use Steerforth's words in
_David Copperfield_, "rather a chuckle-headed fellow for the girl,"
but is apparently welcome. They eat rustic fare together and then
dance; but more company is desired, and Robin goes to fetch it. He
tells the friends he asks that some one has been courting Marion, and
they prudently resolve to bring, one his great pitchfork and another
his good blacktho