But the extreme beauty of the separate scenes makes it a masterpiece. [Sidenote: Antoine de la Salle.] Antoine de la Salle is one of the most fortunate of authors. The tendency of modern criticism is generally to endeavour to prove that some famous author has been wrongly credited with some of the work which has made his fame. Homer, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Rabelais, have all had to pay this penalty. In the case of Antoine de la Salle, on the contrary, critics have vied with each other in heaping unacknowledged masterpieces on his head. His only acknowledged work is the charming romance of _Petit Jean de Saintre_[148]. The first thing added to this has been the admirable satire of the _Quinze Joyes du Mariage_[149], the next the famous collection of the _Cent Nouvelles_[150], and the last the still more famous farce of _Pathelin_[151]. There are for once few or no external reasons why these various attributions should not be admitted, while there are many internal ones why they should. Antoine de la Salle was born in 1398, and spent his life in the employment of different kings and princes;--Louis III of Anjou, King of Naples, his son the good King Rene, the count of Saint Pol, and Philip the Good of Burgundy, who was his natural sovereign. Nothing is known of him after 1461. Of the three prose works which have been attributed to him--there are others of a didactic character in manuscript--the _Quinze Joyes du Mariage_ is extremely brief, but it contains the quintessence of all the satire on that honourable estate which the middle ages had elaborated. Every chapter--there is one for each 'joy' with a prologue and conclusion--ends with a variation on this phrase descriptive of the unhappy Benedict, 'est sy est enclose dans la nasse, et a l'aventure ne s'en repent point et s'il n'y estait il se y mettroit bientot; la usera sa vue en languissant, et finira miserablement ses jours.' The satire is much quieter and of a more humorous and less boisterous character than was usual at the time. The _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ are to all intents and purposes prose _fabliaux_. They have the full licence of that class of composition, its sparkling fun, its truth to the conditions of ordinary human life. Many of them are taken from the work of the Italian novelists, but all are handled in a thoroughly original manner. In style they are perhaps the best of all the late mediaeval prose works, being clear, precise, and definite without the least appearance of baldness or dryness. _Petit Jehan de Saintre_ is, together with the _Chronique de Messire Jacques de Lalaing_[152] of Georges Chastellain (a delightful biography, which is not a work of fiction), the hand-book of the last age of chivalry. Jehan de Saintre, who was a real person of the preceding century, but from whom the novelist borrows little or nothing but his name, falls in love with a lady who is known by the fantastic title of 'la dame des belles cousines.' He wins general favour by his