and Babrius, a Greek, made collections of fables about animals. Drawing partly from these collections, Marie de France, the writer of Breton lays, wrote her Y sopet, mentioned in Chapter I. But the title of her book suggests an even remoter source, and this we discover in Æsop, whose collection dates from the sixth century, B.C.; while Æsop, the Samian slave, had drawn on Eastern sources, including the Birthtales of Buddha and the Fables of Bidpai. Among other source-books available in the Middle Ages were the 'Natural History' of Pliny (the Elder, fl. A.D.70), and a long series known as Physiologi, with an Egyptian Physiologus at their head: a kind of sacred natural-history books, inculcating moral virtues by observation of animal life. The Book of Secrets' by Albertus Magnus, a leading savant of the thirteenth century, is also to be mentioned in this context.

But the multiplication of models is unnecessary. Briefly, the vogue is to be traced to a very common human practice, as simple as it is instinctive. The habit of comparison between a busy man and a bee, a subtle man and a serpent, a stupid man and an ass, an industrious man and an ant, a greedy man and a pig, may be observed in every present nursery, and was doubtless familiar in the childhood of the human race. More important than the origins are the specimens, and mention may be made by anticipation of the fascination exercised by these source-books on the antiquaries and wits of a later date. The old bestiaries, herbaries, volucraries (bird-tales), lapidaries (precious stone-tales), etc., were ransacked for their quaint lore and for their yet more curious images.

To these aspects we shall return in due course. Meanwhile, in the thirteenth century, gleaners in the field of plenty found their labour facilitated by two external causes, not unconnected with each other.

One was the enlargement of the social circle and the shifting of its centre away from court and camp to civic mart and rural green, with a consequent readiness of opinion to test and revise moral values. The other was the striking analogy, seized by what was then the new criticism, between types of the animal creation and the heroes of the Carlovingian legend.

Everyone knew Charlemagne. Everyone knew the old tales of the king's crafty barons and needy monks, his powerful fangs worn to decay, his authority flouted and set at nought, his credulity as long as his beard, and his empire parted among his heirs. The chansons de geste of Charlemagne were familiar in every feudal tongue, and feudal society in those days reproduced again and again the experiences narrated in the chansons. A baron home from the war might find a rival in his castle. A knight might be worsted in encounter with a selfseeking steward of his property. A homely countryman might be fleeced by a clever man about town. The Fox and the Lion met in many relations of life, and the folk-lore of animal life which Æsop, Babrius and Phaedrus had handed down to a hundred practitioners was exploited by satirists of society in imitation of the Charlemagne tales. Noble the Lion was the old king, outwitted by Reynard the Fox, and all the menagerie of beasts was used, as the Fable grew, to point under transparent disguises the universal moral of nimble wits and empty crowns. The satire was imposed upon the folk-tale, and the vast and ramified Beast-epic known as the Roman de Renart was the result.

We need not quote from it to-day. Thomas Carlyle, a hundred years ago, wrote that 'the story, more than any other, is a truly European performance for some centuries the universal Household

Possession and Secular Bible, read everywhere, in the palace and the hut'. In its first completed form it ranged through the world of man-like beasts in more than a hundred thousand verses. France and Germany sent their contributions, and modern writers enumerate twenty-seven branches of the story, composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Caxton in 1481 imprinted the Fable in English. Goethe in 1792 wrote a version of Reinecke Fuchs. But it is distracting to dwell on the anatomy of what was written wholly for delight. Whatever its origin and later history, the true home of the roman is France. The names of the animals are French, French wit enlivens the recital, and sundry indications point to Picardy as the first home of the Fable. Before Reynard had finished his adventures he had proved his aptness for anything that offered itself. He reconciled warring theologians. He went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He told tales of the Alexandriad. He became Confessor to Lion the King. In a word, or, most appropriately, in the words of Ste.-Beuve, the greatest French critic, this romance of Reynard the Fox was

'the satirical masterpiece of the thirteenth century. It echoes the rancour of the small against the great, and expresses the political or religious daring of statesmen, jongleurs, monks, and scholars. Moreover, it is animated with that imperious spirit against women, which is So sharply and repugnantly emphasized in many of the fabliaux'.

We come through the satirists and fabulists, through the allegorists, the Schoolmen and the Troubadours, to the greatest writer of the Middle Ages, perhaps the greatest Italian poet,

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VIII. DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321),

who drew inspiration from them all.

Dante's works, to pass at once to these, may be enumerated as follows

1. De Vulgari Eloquentia, a Latin treatise on the 'vulgar' (Italian) tongue, which, in the early stages of its foliation in Tuscany, Dante had the courage and the foresight to describe as illustrious'. His choice of it as the medium of his own poetry, and the extraordinary triumphs which he won in it, conferred an obligation on his fellow-countrymen which they have always loyally acknowledged. Prof. Saintsbury, in his History of Criticism, describes this treatise of the thirteenth century as on a line with the very greatest critical documents of all history', and we have referred elsewhere to Dante's brilliant and convenient classification of the Langues d'Oc, d'Oïl, and de Si, for Northern and Southern French and Italian respectively.

2. De Monarchia, another Latin treatise, which students interested in the development of the theory of government should read in conjunction with Dante's epistle (c. 1309) To all the Kings in Italy, Senators, Dukes and Peoples'. It was, alas, a plurality of kings which was Italy's trouble in those days, and Dante, as an exiled patriot, hugged the far-off hope that the Emperor Henry VII would prove the single saviour and regenerator. He expounded, in terms of the highest idealism, his conception of the true aim of Italian governance, when Cæsar should be just and Peter should be wise.

3. Il Convito, The Banquet', in Italian prose. The title was taken from Plato's Symposium, but the prose, a new organ of Italian style, was a little tentative and immature. The attraction of the treatise

lies in its account of the poet's surrender to philosophy, and in the discourses on love and virtue with which he adorned his theme.

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4. Canzoniere, Songs'. These were the poems of Dante's youth, written in his Troubadour days, when, as we saw above, the new glory of our tongue passed from the keeping of the two Guidos to him whose fuller songtide would chase them both from the nest. We saw then what kind of songs they were which Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, and Dante poured out successively to love: how rare in sentiment, how rapturous in adoration, how mystical in communion with the spirit beyond the flesh. We need not adduce fresh evidence. Here it is more appropriate to explain that the Italian canzone is a lyrical poem arranged in strophes of a carefully complicated design. The Sonnet, new in this epoch, was a single strophe of a canzone. Its fourteen lines were an octave and a sestet (eight lines and six), with the rhymes disposed as follows

with other possible variations. The sonnet-form became a test of the quality of lyric poets, and it passed through Petrarch, as we shall see, into the inheritance of the Renaissance in France, Spain, England, and other countries. Another lyric measure was the Madrigal, arranged in triplets and couplets, as an offshoot of pastoral song.

Special mention is due to the Italian metres with linked rhymes (rime incatenate, a chain of rhymes) which were practised mainly in two sorts, viz.

i. Terza rima, of which the rhyme-scheme is aba, bcb, cdc, ded.

and which Dante used in his Commedia ;