390 ROMANCES. 



players. The result was that the romances, being no longer sung to the 

 accompaniment of the harp or the violin, but recited in a monotonous tone, 

 became submerged in a mass of marvellous and improbable stories, and were 

 drawn out to a wearisome length. Not only were new compositions with 

 thirty or forty thousand Alexandrine lines brought out, but the ancient 

 romances written in ten-syllable verse were recast, and the lines lengthened. 

 The primitive work, thus disfigured, lost all its original qualities. The 

 trouveurs who were writing for the jugglers succeeded, however, in opening 

 a fresh cycle, which belongs at once to the history of Charlemagne's successors 

 and to that of the Crusades. The romances of " Charles the Bald " and of 

 " Hugnes Capet " were not more voluminous than the ancient romances, but 

 " Baudouin de Sebourc " had more than thirty thousand lines, and " Tristan de 

 Nanteuil " twenty-four thousand. The " Lion de Bourges," which consists 

 of forty thousand tame and prolix lines, is a riot of the imagination in which 

 there is no trace of the traditions relating to Charlemagne's epoch, which 

 the writer professed to. portray for the last time. 



This was the death-blow to the jugglers, for they could not find any one to 

 listen to the recital of these interminable romances. Nevertheless, as many 

 of them turned copyists in order to gain a livelihood, the manuscripts went 

 on increasing, and the longest and dullest of romances still found readers. 

 But though the reading of romances increased rather than diminished 

 amongst the wealthy and noble classes, with whom the taste for tourna- 

 ments, jousts, and other games and institutions appertaining to chivalry 

 (Fig. 314) grew very rapidly, only prose romances found any favour. The 

 rhymed romances were condemned as a nuisance, and the consequence was a 

 rapid transformation of them into prose. There was no lack of scribes in the 

 palaces of the kings, as in the castles of the nobility, to undertake this work, 

 and the anonymous author of the translation of " Aimeri de Beaulandc " gives 

 as his reason for having undertaken the work that it suits the popular taste. 

 In the preface to the prose version of " Anseis de Carthage " the actcitr, as he 

 was called, openly states that he felt great hesitation and mistrust of his own 

 person in transposing from rhyme into prose, " according to the tastes of the 

 day," the achievements of ancient chivalry. 



The old romances in verse disappeared and fell into oblivion, but the prose 

 versions, arranged according to the tastes of the day, tricked out with senti- 

 mental and pedantic digressions, and lengthened with a mass of descriptions 



