the Alexandrine of _Guillaume de Palerne_ reference has already been made. Blanchefleur--known all over Europe with her lover Floire (Floris, etc.)--the Saracen slave who charms a Christian prince, and is rescued by him from the Emir of Babylon, to whom she has been sold in hopes of weaning Floris from his attachment, more than deserved her vogue. But, as in the case of the _chansons_, mere cataloguing would be dull and unprofitable, and analysis on the scale accorded to _Partenopeus_ impossible. One must only take up once more the note of this whole early part of our history, and impress again on the reader the evident _desire_ for the accomplished novel which these numerous romances show; the inevitable _practice_, in tale-telling of a kind, which the production of them might have given; and, above all, the openings, germs, suggestions of new devices in fiction which are observable in them, and which remained for others to develop if the first finders left them unimproved. FOOTNOTES: [58] That is, of nothing like the length of the latest forms of the _Chansons de Geste_ or the Arthurian Romances proper. Some of the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Adventure stories, before they dropped into prose, are indeed long enough, and a great deal too long; but they show degeneracy. [59] The _h_ (Part_h_-) does occur in both forms, and there are other variation, as "Part_o_nopeus," etc. But these are trifles. [60] Taking honour to the mother as separate from that to the father. [61] The Spanish-English form is perhaps the prettier. I am sorry to say that the poet, to get a rhyme, sometimes spells it "Urra_cle_," which is _not_ pretty. Southey's "Queen _O_rraca" seems to me to have changed her vowel to disadvantage. [62] The original author of the _Court of Love_, whether Chaucer or another, pretty certainly knew it; and Spenser spiritualised the doctrine itself in the _Four Hymns_. [63] I think the medical people (borrowing, as Science so often does, the language which she would fain banish from human knowledge) call this sort of thing _a syndrome_. [64] See below on Urraca's plain speaking. [65] Not too commentatorially identified with Constantinople. [66] It may be worth noting that in this context appears the original form of an English word quite common recently, but almost unknown a very short time ago--"grouse" in the sense of "complain," "grumble": "Ce dist Corsols et nul n'en _grouce_." [67] No one will be rude enough to disbelieve her, and, as will be seen, her supernatural powers had limits; but it was odd, though fortunate, that they should have broken down exactly at this important juncture. Who made those rebellious candles take him to that chamber and couch, unknown to her?