e
personifying taste, which bred or was bred from allegory, is very
close akin to the dramatic taste, and the _fabliau_, as has been said
more than once, is a farce in the making, and sometimes far advanced
towards being completely made.

[Sidenote: _Early French prose._]

All the matter hitherto discussed in this chapter, as well as all that
of previous chapters as far as French is concerned, with the probable
if not certain exception of the Arthurian romances, has been in verse.
Indeed--still with this exception, and with the further and more
certain exceptions of a few laws, a few sermons, &c.--there was no
French prose, or none that has come down to us, until the thirteenth
century. The Romance tongues, as contradistinguished from Anglo-Saxon
and Icelandic, were slow to develop vernacular prose; the reason,
perhaps, being that Latin, of one kind or another, was still so
familiar to all persons of any education that, for purposes of
instruction and use, vernacular prose was not required, while verse
was more agreeable to the vulgar.

[Sidenote: _Laws and sermons._]

Yet it was inevitable that prose should, sooner or later, make its
appearance; and it was equally inevitable that spoken prose sermons
should be of the utmost antiquity. Indeed such sermons form, by
reasonable inference, the subject of the very earliest reference[155]
to that practically lost _lingua romana rustica_ which formed the
bridge between Latin and the Romance tongues. But they do not seem to
have been written down, and were no doubt extempore addresses rather
than regular discourses. Law appears to have had the start of divinity
in the way of providing formal written prose; and the law-fever of the
Northmen, which had already shaped, or was soon to shape, the
"Gray-goose" code of their northernmost home in Iceland, expressed
itself early in Normandy and England--hardly less early in the famous
_Lettres du Sepulcre_ or _Assises de Jerusalem_, the code of the
Crusading kingdom, which was drawn up almost immediately after its
establishment, and which exists, though not in the very oldest form.
Much uncertainty prevails on the question when the first sermons in
French vernacular were formally composed, and by whom. It has been
maintained, and denied, that the French sermons of St Bernard which
exist are original, in which case the practice must have come in
pretty early in the twelfth century. There is, at any rate, no doubt
that Maurice de Su