It is the very tone of Thackeray, when Thackeray is tender, and the world heard it first from this elderly, nameless minstrel, strolling with his viol and his singing boys, perhaps, like a blameless d'Assoucy, from castle to castle in "the happy poplar land." One seems to see him and hear him in the twilight, in the court of some chateau of Picardy, while the ladies on silken cushions sit around him listening, and their lovers, fettered with silver chains, lie at their feet. They listen, and look, and do not think of the minstrel with his grey head and his green heart, but we think of him. It is an old man's work, and a weary man's work. You can easily tell the places where he has lingered, and been pleased as he wrote. They are marked, like the bower Nicolete built, with flowers and broken branches wet with dew. Such a passage is the description of Nicolete at her window, in the strangely painted chamber, "ki faite est par grant devisse panturee a miramie." Thence "she saw the roses blow, Heard the birds sing loud and low." Again, the minstrel speaks out what many must have thought, in those incredulous ages of Faith, about Heaven and Hell, Hell where the gallant company makes up for everything. When he comes to a battle-piece he makes Aucassin "mightily and knightly hurl through the press," like one of Malory's men. His hero must be a man of his hands, no mere sighing youth incapable of arms. But the minstrels heart is in other things, for example, in the verses where Aucassin transfers to Beauty the wonder-working powers of Holiness, and makes the sight of his lady heal the palmer, as the shadow of the Apostle, falling on the sick people, healed them by the Gate Beautiful. The Flight of Nicolete is a familiar and beautiful picture, the daisy flowers look black in the ivory moonlight against her feet, fair as Bombyca's "feet of carven ivory" in the Sicilian idyll, long ago. {4} It is characteristic of the poet that the two lovers begin to wrangle about which loves best, in the very mouth of danger, while Aucassin is yet in prison, and the patrol go down the moonlit street, with swords in their hands, sworn to slay Nicolete. That is the place and time chosen for this ancient controversy. Aucassin's threat that if he loses Nicolete he will not wait for sword or knife, but will dash his head against a wall, is in the very temper of the prisoned warrior-poet, who actually chose this way of death. Then the night scene, with its fantasy, and shadow, and moonlight on flowers and street, yields to a picture of the day, with the birds singing, and the shepherds laughing, in the green links between wood and water. There the shepherds take Nicolete for a fairy, so bright a beauty shines about her. Their mockery, their independence, may make us consider again our ideas of early Feudalism. Probably they were in the service of townsmen, whose good town treated the Count as no more than an equal of its corporate dignity.