history of almost every troubadour has been written; and all those that were published by Nostradamus and collected by M. de Saint Palaye, and republished by Millot, have a romantic air. The Trouvères are far more obscure; scarcely a name or a record of them having reached our times; or, if an adventure regarding one of the fraternity has been handed down to us, it is generally of a character remote from the romantic.

The Trouvères have left us chivalrous romances and fabliaux ; the first of which are the boast and honour of the twelfth and thir teenth centuries. All the chivalry which bursts forth on a sudden in these romances, that heroism of honour and of love,—that devotion of the stronger to the weaker sex, that nobleness and purity of character, every where presented as a model, and in almost every instance triumphant over the severest trials; that new and supernatural generosity, so different from what we trace in antiquity, and in the inventions of any other people; presuppose a force and brilliancy of imagination which nothing has prepared, and which not any known rule for developing human manners can explain.

Romantic mythology may be divided into three distinct classes; which are the appendages of three different epochs in the first moiety of the middle age; and which represent three armies of fabulous heroes, who have no communication with each other. The successive birth, and peculiar character, of each of these mythologies will perhaps throw the best light on the first invention of the whole species. The first class of chivalrous romances celebrated the exploits of King Arthur, son of Pendragon, the last British king who defended England against the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons; and the enchanter Merlin, the institution of the Round Table, and all the preux chevaliers, Tristan, Lancelot of the Lake, &c. were attached to the court of this king and his wife Ginevra. The origin of this history is found in the romance of Brut. In that fabulous Chronicle, King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Prophet Merlin are already brought forwards; and subsequent romances finished the creation, and converted the court of Arthur into a living world, whose characters were not less known than those of Louis the Fourteenth are at this day. The active and enterprising people who gave birth to these tales knew no other pleasure in their hours of idleness than that of listening to adventures, dangers, and battles; and they had need of recitals that would stir the imagination by amusing it with the grand game of hazard played with the life of man. They loved to see every hero stand alone, combat alone, and attain unassisted the object of his endeavours, as Guillaume Bras-de-Fer, or Fieribras, Osmond, Robert, Roger, and Bæmond had done;

bravery

bravery was their idol; the other virtues were of the later school; and the nation whose hero took the surname of Crafty, or perfidious, (for such is the signification of Guiscard,) certainly did not condemn perfidy so much as cowardice. Love was undoubtedly, as with the Provençals, a necessary ingredient in the tale: but with the Normans love did not attain to that purity and constancy which were ornaments conferred on it by the southern romancers. Supernatural agency confined itself to the interposition of fairies and wizards. Those almost celestial genii, who dispose of all the wonders of art and nature, and who with a word create enchanted palaces, in which all that can dazzle or delight the senses is united by the orders of a magician, were all additions of the south. The early romancers placed their scenes invariably either in Britain or in northern France; and we find neither Italy nor Spain, nor the Moors, once mentioned by these Norman bards. The existence of Fays, a species of beings who influenced the destinies of man, but were not unfrequently in need of human protection, was an article of faith with all the northern nations in their pagan state; and, in those ages, they were the sombre priestesses to wood-demons, their organs and interpreters. Christianity had not yet instructed the Normans to deny their power; adherence to the abandoned religion was considered as magic; and the power of fays was a modification of that of the devil. "In that time," says the author of the Romance of Lancelot, "all who meddled with charms and enchantments were called Fays, and their number was very great, principally in Britain: they knew the force and virtue of woods, of stones, and of herbs, by the which they were kept in youth, in beauty, and in riches," &c. The heroes of chivalry travel incessantly from France and Little Britain (Brittany) to England, Ireland, and Scotland. In proportion to the real obscurity of places appears to have been their romantic celebrity; and hence Cornwall, of all other counties, was the most in vogue.

The second family of chivalric romances is that of Amadis, to whose creation other literatures put in their claims in opposition to France. The scenes of their exploits remain, as before, Scotland, England, Brittany, and France. Amadis de Gaul, the first of these romances, and model of the others, is claimed by people to the south of the Pyrenees as the work of Vasco Lobeira, a Portuguese who lived between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We cannot, however, reconcile the locality of Amadis with a Portuguese origin. The scene is in France, and precisely in those places which were illustrated by the Round Table. Why has not the author conducted his hero into Spain, at that time ravaged by the Moors, and consequently

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quently of immediate interest to a writer among a neighbouring people? No dispute prevails respecting the origin of other romances, the echoes and imitations of Amadis de Gaul; such as Amadis of Greece, and all the others who assumed that name, Florismart of Hyrcania, Galaor, Florestan, and Esplandian: all these romances are evidently of Spanish origin, and bear on them the type and impression of their descent. Oriental bombast in them succeeds to the antient naiveté of style; the imagination becomes more extravagant and less male; love is more refined, valour more like rhodomontade, religion more generally diffused, and fanaticism begins to shew her teeth and claws of persecution. These compositions were crowned with the success of the moment; and, when Cervantes published his inimitable Don Quixote, the epidemic was at its height.

The third family of chivalric romances is wholly French, although their greatest celebrity is owing to the grand poet of Italy who took possession of the subject. We mean that of the Court and Paladins of Charlemagne. The history of Charlemagne, the most brilliant of the middle age, necessarily left to successive ages a sentiment of wonder and admiration; his long reign, his prodigious activity, his splendid victories, his wars with the Saracens, Saxons, and Lombards, his influence over Germany, Italy, and Spain, and the renovation of the western empire, had made his name popular over all Europe long after the memory of the events which signalized it was lost. He was indeed a hero peculiar to chivalry, a star shining in the midst of darkness, to which a fantastic creation might be easily attached. The mythology connected with this prince is the subject of the divine Ariosto.

As to the knights. of this new and beautiful romance, they no longer wandered like their predecessors in the gloomy forests of a half-barbarous country, almost constantly covered with fog and mist; the whole universe expanded itself to their eyes and to their wanderings; the Holy Land was the great object of their pilgrimage; and by this route they formed a communication with the great and rich countries of the East. Their geography extended over more delightful lands. All the softness and perfumes of countries highly favoured by nature were at their disposal; all the pomp and magnificence of Damascus, Bagdad, and Constantinople contributed to adorn the triumph of their heroes; and the acquisition of a southern imagination, more precious than all the perfumes of the East, shed a charm and a colouring over the gloomy mythology of the North. The fays were no longer sorceresses, hideous in figure and the objects of hatred and fear: but gentle and lovely spirits, born in light, and inhabitants of airy regions, were the beings

created

created by their pens. To the art of prolonging life, they had added that of increasing its delights; they were, in a manner, the priestesses of nature, and of her pomps and spectacles. At their voice, splendid palaces sprang up in deserts; enchanted gardens, and groves of oranges and myrtles, flourished in the midst of sands, or on the shoals and the bosom of the seas; gold, diamonds, and pearls covered the light filaments of their robes, and the roofs of their palaces; and their love, far from being accounted sacrilegious, was frequently the most flattering recompence of the warrior's labours.

The French,' says M. DE SISMONDI, possessed, beyond all other modern nations, an inventive spirit. Complaints, sighs, and the developement of impassioned sentiments, fatigued them sooner than other people; they demanded something more attractive and substantial to captivate their attention. We have seen that the rich and brilliant invention of chivalrous romances arose among them; they were also the inventors of fabliaux, or tales of laughter; and they gave more life to the talent of narration, by placing the recitals under the eye, and by creating the new dramatic art, or mysteries. On the other hand, we perceive among them, at the same epoch, works of great length, and of a different nature; I mean allegories, which were equally imitated by all who wrote romances.'

Of these allegorical poems, the most celebrated and most antient is the Romance of the Rose, of which the name is familiar to all the world, but the intention and nature are known to a very few. First, it is necessary to inform the reader that the Romance of the Rose is by no means a romance in the sense which we at present attach to the term. At the epoch of its composition, the French was yet called the Roman language; and all long works written in that language were denominated romances. That of the Rose amounts to twenty thousand verses; and it is the work of two different authors. Guillaume de Lorris, who began it, wrote only the first four thousand one hundred and fifty lines; his continuator, Jean de Meun, composed the rest, at least fifty years after the conclusion of the former part.

Guillaume de Lorris proposed to himself to treat the same subject which was discussed by Ovid in his Art of Love: but the difference between the two works will lead us to appreciate that which, existed between the spirit of the two ages. Guillaume de Lorris does not address himself to lovers, he speaks not to them according to his own sentiments or experience, but he relates a dream; and his eternal vision, which would more than occupy many successive nights, possesses neither the variety nor the features of a real dream. It is a crowd of allegorical characters who present themselves to his mind; all the events of a long passion rise on their hinder legs, and are transformed, for his service, into beings to whom he assigns names. The lady Idle, or Idleness, first inspires the lover with the desire of searching

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searching for the Rose, or the prize of Love. Evil-mouth and Danger prevent his access; Felony and Baseness, Hatred and Avarice, thwart him in the pursuit; all the vices and all the virtues of humanity are in turn personified and introduced on the stage; one allegory is linked to another; and the imagination is banded about between these fictitious beings, on which it cannot succeed in conferring a body. All interest is necessarily destroyed by that fatiguing conception,' &c. Nevertheless, in the age in which the Romance of the Rose appeared, the less it interested as a recital, the more it was admired as an effort of wit, a moral conception, and poetic fiction. The play of wit astonished at every line; the aim of the author was ever kept in view; and, from the moment at which poesy was considered by the French as a source of agreeable instruction, the Romance of the Rose appeared to accomplish this object because it seemed to contain it ingeniously wrapped in mystery. Our opinions, however, would be widely different from those of our ancestors: we could not permit the delineation of vice in all its impudence to be the medium of inspiring virtue, as Guillaume de Lorris has made it; we could not endure the cynical and insulting strain in which these authors speak of females; and we should be offended at that grossness which is so estranged from the idea that we entertain of chivalrous love and gallantry. Our ancestors were, without doubt, less delicate than ourselves, and no book has met with such prodigious success as the Romance of the Rose: it was admired not merely as a master-piece of wit, of invention, and of practical philosophy, but its readers attempted to find in it that which the author had not dreamed of inserting, and, under the first allegory, they sought a second. They pretended that Lorris had concealed under the form of allegory the most important mysteries of theology; they wrote learned commentaries, which are found annexed to the edition of Paris, (1531, folio,) in which the key was given to that divine allegory; and they referred the most licentious passages and pictures of terrestrial love to the grace of God. True it is that adoration for a profane, and, in many passages, an immoral book, at length drew down on it the animadversion of certain fathers of the church. Jean Jerson, chancellor of the university of Paris, and one of the most accredited among the fathers of the council of Constance, wrote a Latin treatise against this work; and from that moment a number of preachers thundered against it, at the same time that others of the fraternity cited from it passages intermingled and confounded with texts of Scripture.'

M. DE SISMONDI proceeds to notice several works written in imitation of this soporiferous vision, and thence traces the origin of those fabliaux, originally of Norman invention, some of which have been happily translated into our own language by Mr. Way. Of these, without question, the most affecting is that of Aucassin and Nicolette, which, modernized by M. Le Grand, assumes the title of The Loves of the good old Times. The original is written in alternate prose and verse, with occasionally a few lines of music. The Lays of Aristotle, and of the Little Bird, are charming tales. The poesy of the Trouvères,