CHAUCER. 221 



the usurper Fromond. The time is just as the dreaded 

 dawn begins to break. 



&quot; Gamier, fair son, the noble lady said, 

 To save thy father s life must thou be dead ; 

 And mine, alas, must be with sorrow spent, 

 Since thou must die, albeit so innocent 1 

 Evening thou shalt not see that see st the morn ! 

 Woe worth the hour that I beheld thee born, 

 Whom nine long months within my side I bore ! 

 Was never babe desired so much before, 

 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 tearswoln for thy sake, 

 That twill 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 hastes to go ! 

 These clerks and cloistered folk, alas, in spite 

 So early sing to cheat me of my night ! &quot; 



The great advantages which the langue d oil had over its 

 sister dialect of the South of France were its wider dis 

 tribution, 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 

 supersubtilised 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 

 unconsciously drew the colouring of vivid expression. The 



