Despite this admission, however, and despite the further one that it is to the "romances" proper--Arthurian, classical, and adventurous--rather than to the _chansons_ that one must look for the first satisfactory examples of such clothing and addition, it is not to be denied that the _chansons_ themselves provide a great deal of it--whether because of adulteration with strictly "romance" matter is a question for debate in another place and not here. But it would be a singularly ungrateful memory which should, in this place, leave the reader with the idea that the _Chanson de Geste_ as such is merely monotonous and dull. The intensity of the appeal of _Roland_ is no doubt helped by that approach to bareness--even by a certain tautology--which has been mentioned. _Aliscans_, which few could reject as faithless to the type, contains, even without the family of dependent poems which cluster round it, a vivid picture of the valiant insubordinate warrior in William of Orange, with touches of comedy or at least horse-play. [Sidenote: Some instances of this.] The striking, and to all but unusually dull or hopelessly "modern" imaginations as unusually beautiful, centre-point of _Amis et Amiles_,--where one of the heroes, who has sworn a "white" perjury to save his friend and is punished for it by the terror, "white" in the other sense, of leprosy, is abandoned by his wife, and only healed by the blood of the friend's children, is the crowning instance of another set of appeals. The catholicity of a man's literary taste, and his more special capacity of appreciating things mediaeval, may perhaps be better estimated by his opinion of _Amis et Amiles_ than by any other touchstone; for it has more appeals than this almost tragic one--a much greater development of the love-motive than either _Roland_ or _Aliscans_, and a more varied interest generally. Its continuation, _Jourdains de Blaivies_, takes the hero abroad, as do many other _chansons_, especially two of the most famous, _Huon de Bordeaux_ and _Ogier de Danemarche_. These two are also good--perhaps the best--examples of a process very much practised in the Middle Ages and leaving its mark on future fiction--that of expansion and continuation. In the case of Ogier, indeed, this process was carried so far that enquiring students have been known to be sadly disappointed in the almost total disconnection between William Morris's beautiful section of _The Earthly Paradise_ and the original French, as edited by Barrois in the first attempt to collect the _chansons_ seventy or eighty years ago. The great "Orange" subcycle, of which _Aliscans_ is the most famous, extends in many directions, but is apt in all its branches to cling more to "war and politics." William of Orange is in this respect partly matched by Garin of Lorraine. No _chanson_ retained its popularity, in every sense of that word, better than the _Quatre Fils d'Aymon_--the