CHAUCER. l8l 



Now summer will the pleasant days recall 

 When I shall take my stand upon the wall 

 And see the fair young gentlemen thy peers 

 That come and go, and, as beseems their years 

 Run at the quintain, strive to pierce the shield, 

 And in the tourney keep their sell or yield; 

 Then must my heart be tearsvvoln for thy sake 

 That t will be marvel if it do not break. 

 At morning, when the day began to peer, 

 Matins rang out from minsters far and near, 

 And the clerks sang full well with voices high. 

 God, said the dame, thou glorious in the sky, 

 These lingering nights were wont to tire me so ! 

 And this, alas, how swift it halter tc go ! 

 These clerks and cloistered folk, alas, in spite 

 So early sing to cheat me of my night ! * 



The great advantages which the langue d oil had over its 

 sister dialect of the South of France were its wider distribution, 

 and its representing the national and unitary tendencies of the 

 people as opposed to those of provincial isolation. But the 

 Trouveres had also this superiority, that they gave a voice to 

 real and not merely conventional emotions. In comparison 

 with the Troubadours their sympathies were more human, and 

 their expression more popular. While the tiresome ingenuity of 

 the latter busied itself chiefly in the filigree of wire-drawn 

 sentiment and supersubtilized conceit, the former took their 

 subjects from the street and the market as well as from the 

 chateau. In the one case language had become a mere material 

 for clever elaboration ; in the other, as always in live literature, 

 it was a soil from which the roots of thought and feeling uncon 

 sciously drew the colouring of vivid expression. The writers of 

 French, by the greater pliancy of their dialect and the simpler 

 forms of their verse, had acquired an ease which was impossible 

 in the more stately and sharply-angled vocabulary of the South. 

 Their octosyllabics have not seldom a careless facility not un 

 worthy of Swift in his best mood. They had attained the 

 highest skill and grace in narrative, as the lays of Marie de 

 France and the Lai de POiselet bear witness.* Above all, they 

 had learned how to brighten the hitherto monotonous web of 

 story with the gayer hues of fancy. 



It is no improbable surmise that the sudden and surprising 

 development of the more strictly epical poetry in the North of 

 France, and especially its growing partiality for historical in 

 preference to mythical subjects, were due to the Normans. The 

 poetry of the Danes was much of it authentic history, or what 

 was believed to be so ; the heroes of their Sagas were real men, 



* If internal evidence may be trusted, the Lai de FEsjine is not hers. 



