pretty
rapidly; and, as La Fontaine has shown to thousands who have never
known--perhaps have never heard of--his early masters, he had an
instrument which would answer to his desires perfectly if only he knew
how to finger it.

At the same time, both the lover of poetry and the lover of tale must
acknowledge that, though alliance between them is not in the least an
unholy one, and has produced great and charming children, the best of
the poetry is always a sort of extra bonus or solace to the tale, and
the tale not unfrequently seems as if it could get on better without the
poetry. The one can only aspire somewhat irrelevantly; the other can
never attain quite its full development. So it was no ill day when the
prose _nouvelle_ came to its own in France.

[Sidenote: _Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles._]

The first remarkable collection was the famous _Cent Nouvelles
Nouvelles_, traditionally attributed to Louis XI. when Dauphin and an
exile in Brabant, with the assistance of friends and courtiers, but
more recently selected by critics that way minded as part of the baggage
they have "commandeered" for Antoine de la Salle. The question of
authorship is of scarcely the slightest importance to us; though the
point last mentioned is worth mentioning, because we shall have to
notice the favoured candidate in this history again. There are certainly
some of the hundred that he might have written.

In the careless way in which literary history used to be dealt with, the
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ were held to be mere imitation of the
_Decameron_ and other Italian things. It is, of course, much more than
probable that the Italian _novella_ had not a little to do with the
precipitation of the French _nouvelle_ from its state of solution in the
_fabliau_. But the person or persons who, in imitating the _Decameron_,
produced the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ had a great deal more to do--and
did a great deal less--than this mere imitation of their original. As
for a group of included tales, the already-mentioned _Seven Wise
Masters_[80] was known in France much before Boccaccio's time. The title
was indeed admittedly Italian, but such an obvious one as to require no
positive borrowing, and there is in the French book no story-framework
like that of the plague and the country-house visit; no cheerful
personalities like Fiammetta or Dioneo make not merely the intervals but
the stories themselves alive with a special interest. Above all,