Before this awful time comes for them, however, the minstrels thrive under the last Plantagenets. Their bill is a varied one, and includes the best and the worst; they sometimes recite the "Troilus" of Chaucer,[572] and sometimes the ancient romances of chivalry, altered, spoiled, shorn of all their poetry. Chaucer had ridiculed these versions of the old heroic stories, written in tripping verses, but in vain. Throughout his life, after as well as before "Sir Thopas," he could wonder and laugh at the success of stories, composed in the very style of his own burlesque poem, about heroes who, being all peerless, are necessarily all alike: one is "stalworthe and wyghte," another "hardy and wyght," a third also "hardy and wyght"; and the fourth, fifth, and hundredth are equally brave and invincible. They are called Isumbras, Eglamour, Degrevant[573]; but they differ in their names and in nothing more. The booksellers of the Renaissance who printed their histories could make the same woodcut on the cover serve for all their portraits. By merely altering the name beneath, they changed all there was to change; one and the same block did duty in turn for Romulus or Robert the Devil.[574] Specimens of this facile art swarm indefinitely; they are scattered over the country, penetrate into hamlets, find their way into cottages, and make the people acquainted with the doughty deeds of Eglamour and Roland. We now find ourselves really in the copse. In the middle of the copse are trees of finer growth. Some among the poets, while conforming to the old style, improve upon their models as they proceed; they add an original note of their own, and on that account deserve to be listened to. Far above those empty, tripping metrical stories, and superior even to "Morte Arthure" and to "William of Palerne,"[575] written in English verse at the time of Chaucer, ranks "Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight,"[576] being incomparably the best specimen of the style. Instead of puppets with jerky movements, and wooden joints that we hear crack, the English poet shows in this work real men and women, with supple limbs and red lips; elegant, graceful, and charming to behold. These knights and ladies in their well-fitting armour or their tight dresses, whom we see stretched in churches on their fourteenth-century tombs, have come back to life once more; and now they move, they gaze on each other, they love again. On Christmas day, in presence of Arthur and his whole Court, Sir Gawayne cuts off the head of the Green Knight. This giant knight is doubtless an enchanter, for he stoops, picks up his head, and, remounting his horse, bids Sir Gawayne meet him a year hence at the Green Chapel, where he will give him blow for blow.