against Romance at large. They are not, as a
matter of fact, very frequent; but their occurrence certainly does show
the essentially uncritical character of the time.

[77] For of course the knight did not tell the _whole_ story.

[78] _I.e._ not sorry for having tried to kill him, but sorry that she
had not done so.

[79] In _prose_. For the very important part played by the home verse
_fabliaux_ see next chapter.

CHAPTER V

ALLEGORY, FABLIAU, AND PROSE STORY OF COMMON LIFE

[Sidenote: The connection with prose fiction of allegory.]

It was shown in the last chapter that fiction, and even prose fiction,
of very varied character began to develop itself in French during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By the fifteenth the development
was very much greater, and the "disrhyming" of romances, the beginnings
of which were very early, came to be a regular, not an occasional,
process; while, by its latter part, verse had become not the usual, but
the exceptional vehicle of romance, and prose romances of enormous
length were popular. But earlier there had still been some obstacles in
the way of the prose novel proper. It was the period of the rise and
reign of Allegory, and France, preceptress of almost all Europe in most
literary kinds, proved herself such in this with the unparalleled
example of the _Roman de la Rose_. But the _Roman de la Rose_ was itself
in verse--the earlier part of it at least in real poetry--and most of
its innumerable imitations were in verse likewise. Moreover, though
France again had been the first to receive and to turn to use the riches
of Eastern apologue, the most famous example of which is _The Seven Wise
Masters_, these rather serious matters do not seem to have especially
commended themselves to the French people. The place of composition of
the most famous of all, the _Gesta Romanorum_, has been fairly settled
to be England, though the original language of composition is not likely
to have been other than Latin. At any rate, the style of serious
allegory, in prose which should also be literature, never really caught
hold of the French taste.

Comic tale-telling, on the other hand, was germane to the very soul of
the race, and had shown itself in _chanson_ and _roman_ episodes at a
very early date. But it had been so abundantly, and in so popular a
manner, associated with verse as a vehicle in those pieces, in the great
beast-epic of _Renart_, and above all in the _fa