368 ROMANCES. 



merit, while the prose romances were merely read or narrated without a 

 musical accompaniment of any kind, and rhyme must naturally have been 

 better adapted than prose to the chansons de geste during the most flourishing 

 period of romances ; that is to say, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 



M. Paulin Paris has set forth very clearly the reasons why the name of 

 romance (romaii) was given in France to the narratives of chivalry before it 

 became the special name for a whole branch of literature. For some time it 

 had been the custom throughout France to talk Romance, but it was not until 

 the close of the eleventh century that any attempt was made to write in 

 Romance : whatever was thus written in the vulgar tongue was Romance. 

 M. Paulin Paris adds, " In this way the same generic name was retained for 

 all these writings. There were romances of the Bible (Fig. 303), romances 

 of the Crusades, romances of King Arthur, romances of the Virgin, romances 

 of the Saints (Fig. 304), of the Passion, of the Image of the World, of 

 Sallust," &c. They were for the most part narratives of warlike and wonder- 

 ful adventures, which the French trouveurs and jugglers had told during the 

 Crusades to all the foreigners who composed the armies from beyond the seas, 

 and these foreigners in course of time gave the unique name of romance to all 

 works of imagination written in prose. Dante, who could write and speak 

 French, has himself fixed the meaning of the word at the end of the 

 thirteenth century in the line 



" Versi d'amore, prose di romanzi." 



Thus the romances in prose were as numerous as those in verse when Dante 

 came to Paris to study the language of Oil. 



The jugglers had, from the thirteenth century, divided romances into 

 three categories, which proceeded from three distinct sources : the romances 

 of Charlemagne, the romances of the Round Table, and the romances of 

 Greek and Roman antiquity. These three categories of romances are thus 

 designated in the " Song of the Saxons : " 



" Ne sont que trois materes a tout home entendant : 

 De France, de Bretagne et de Rome la Grant, 

 Et de ces trois materes n'i a nule semblant. 

 Li conte de Brelagne sont et vain et plaisaut, 

 Cil de Eome sont suge et de sens apparent, 

 Oil de Franeu sont voir (vrais)." . . . 



