'There is none in such ill case, Sad with sorrow, waste with care, Sick with sadness, if he hear, But shall in the hearing be Whole again and glad with glee, So _sweet_ the story.' Loveliness and delicacy are here for their own sakes. We have already passed the early stages of narrative. We are in the time of sweetly patterned art; in the monastery over in England a monk is writing the air of 'Summer is icumen in,' the first known piece of finished, ordered music; everywhere clerks and holy men, aloof a little from the turmoil of life, are making gardens in the margins of missals, and on the roads throughout the world the vagabond students, as separate from the turmoil as the monks, are singing the Latin songs that promised the Renaissance. 'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE' 'THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE' [The thirteenth century.] THINKING of the Renaissance now, we are apt to see only the flowers of its spring, the work of men like Boccaccio and Chaucer, who were strong enough and aloof enough to lift their heads above the flood of classical learning that refreshed them, and to write as blithely as if there had been never a book in the world before them. It is easy to forget those dull years after Chaucer that showed how exceptional he had been in being at once a student and an artist. It is still easier to forget the winter years of ploughing and sowing and premature birth that were before him, the years when no one thought that poetry could be more esteemed than knowledge, those greedy years of rough and ready erudition between the making of the students' songs and the building of the _Decameron_. Many versions of old legends come to us from that time like the _Life of Robert the Devil_, whose son fought with Charlemagne. Many of the legends of the kind that the son of Mr. Bickerstaff's friend was such a proficient in, and many collections of miracles and small romances of chivalry less beautiful than that of Aucassin, were at least written down in these years. The monasteries held most of the learned men, and became more important than the minstrels in the history of story-telling. They produced the books of miracles, and also several armouries of warning examples, many of them taken from the classics, for the vanquishing of scrupulous sinners and the edification of all. Books like the _Gesta Romanorum_, volumes of tales more or less irrelevantly tagged with morals, were the forerunners of collections of less instructive stories, like those of Boccaccio's country-house party, or those of Chaucer's pilgrims riding to Canterbury. These books, with their frequent reference to antiquity, showed signs of the new spirit that was spreading over Europe; the miracle-tales and the exaggerated wondering biographies held the essence of the old. Rome in the former was the city built by Romulus and Remus; Rome in the latter was the place that had been rescued by Charlemagne, the place that was ruled by the Pope.