oyes on the scale of a notice of
Dante or even Froissart, and this without reference to the comparative
literary importance of the three. The million lines of the _chansons
de geste_ do not demand discussion in anything like direct proportion
to their bulk. One _fabliau_, much more one minnesong or troubadour
lyric, has a far greater resemblance of kind to its fellows than even
one modern novel, even one nineteenth-century minor poem, to another.
As the men write in schools, so they can be handled in them.

Yet I should hope that it must have been already made apparent how
very far the present writer is from undervaluing the period with which
he has essayed to deal. He might perhaps be regarded as overvaluing it
with more apparent reason--not, I think, with any reason that is more
than apparent.

For this was the time, if not of the Birth--the exact times and
seasons of literary births no man knoweth--at any rate of the first
appearance, full-blown or full-fledged, of Romance. Many praiseworthy
folk have made many efforts to show that Romance was after all no such
new thing--that there is Romance in the _Odyssey_, Romance in the
choruses of AEschylus, Romance East and West, North and South, before
the Middle Ages. They are only less unwise than the other good folk
who endeavour to tie Romance down to a Teutonic origin, or a Celtic,
or in the other sense a Romance one, to Chivalry (which was in truth
rather its offspring than its parent), to this, and that, and the
other. "All the best things in literature," it has been said, "are
returns"; and this is perfectly true, just as it is perfectly true in
another sense that all the best things in literature are novelties. In
this particular growth, being as it was a product of the unchanging
human mind, there were notes, doubtless, of Homer and of AEschylus, of
Solomon the son of David and of Jesus the son of Sirach. But the
constituents of the mixture were newly grouped; elements which had in
the past been inconspicuous or dormant assumed prominence and
activity; and the whole was new.

It was even one of the few, the very few, permutations and
combinations of the elements of literature, which are of such
excellence, volume, durability, and charm, that they rank above all
minor changes and groupings. An _amabilis insania_ of the same general
kind with those above noted has endeavoured again and again to mark
off and define the chief constituents of the fact. The happiest