ders who command the means of comparing several different
cyclopaedias, or several successive editions of some one cyclopaedia, as,
for example, the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," will find enlightening and
stimulating the not always harmonious views presented on the same
topics. Hallam's "History of Literature in Europe" is an additional
authority by no means to be overlooked.

II.

FROISSART.

1337-1410.

French literature, for the purposes of the present volume, may be said
to commence with Froissart. Froissart is a kind of mediaeval Herodotus.
His time is, indeed, almost this side the middle ages; but he belongs by
character and by sympathy rather to the mediaeval than to the modern
world. He is delightfully like Herodotus in the style and the spirit of
his narrative. Like Herodotus, he became a traveller in order to become
an historian. Like Herodotus, he was cosmopolite enough not to be
narrowly patriotic. Frenchman though he was, he took as much pleasure in
recounting English victories as he did in recounting French. His
countrymen have even accused him of unpatriotic partiality for the
English. His Chronicles have been, perhaps, more popular in their
English form than in their original French. Two prominent English
translations have been made, of which the later, that by Thomas Johnes,
is now most read. Sir Walter Scott thought the earlier excelled in charm
of style.

Jehan or Jean Froissart was a native of Valenciennes. His father meant
to make a priest of him, but the boy had other tastes of his own. Before
he was well out of his teens, he began writing history. This was under
the patronage of a great noble. Froissart was all his life a natural
courtier. He throve on the patronage of the great. It was probably not a
fawning spirit in him that made him this kind of man; it was rather an
innate love of splendor and high exploit. He admired chivalry, then in
its last days, and he painted it with the passion of an idealizer. His
father had been an heraldic painter, so it was perhaps an hereditary
strain in the son that naturally attached him to rank and royalty. The
people--that is, the promiscuous mass of mankind--hardly exist to
Froissart. His pages, spacious as they are, have scarcely room for more
than kings and nobles, and knights and squires. He is a picturesque and
romantic historian, in whose chronicles the glories of the world of
chivalry--a world, as we have said, already dying, and so soon to