for this same reason he abounds in anecdote,
and in the personal detail which, though it may easily be overdone, is
undoubtedly now and then precious for the purpose of enabling us to
conjure up the things and men of old time more fully and correctly.
And there is a Pepysian garrulity as well as a Pepysian shrewdness
about Joinville; so that, on the whole, he fills the position of
ancestor in the second group of historians, the group of lively
_raconteurs_, as well as Villehardouin leads that of inspired
describers. For an instance of the third kind, the philosophical
historian, France, if not Europe, had to wait two centuries, when such
a one came in Comines.

It is almost unnecessary to say that when the secret of producing
prose and its advantages over verse for certain purposes had been
discovered, it was freely employed for all such purposes, scientific
as science was understood, devotional, instructive, business (the
_Livre des Mestiers_, or book of the guilds of Paris, is of the
thirteenth century), and miscellaneous. But few of these things
concern literature proper. It is otherwise with the application of
prose to fiction.

[Sidenote: _Fiction._]

This, as we have seen, had probably taken place in the case of the
Arthurian romances as early as the middle of our period, and
throughout the thirteenth century prose romances of length were not
unknown, though it was later that all the three classes--Carlovingian,
Arthurian, and Antique--were thrown indiscriminately into prose, and
lengthened even beyond the huge length of their later representatives
in verse. But for this reason or that, romance in prose was with rare
exceptions unfavourable to the production of the best literature. It
encouraged the prolixity which was the great curse of the Middle Ages,
and the deficient sense of form and scanty presence of models
prevented the observance of anything like a proper scheme.

[Sidenote: Aucassin et Nicolette.]

But among the numerous origins of this wonderful time the origin of
the short prose tale, in which France was to hold almost if not quite
the highest rank among European countries, was also included. It would
not seem that the kind was as yet very frequently attempted--the fact
that the verse _fabliau_ was still in the very height of its
flourishing-time, made this unlikely; nor was it till that
flourishing-time was over that farces on the one hand, and prose tales
on the other, succeeded as fruit the