a sentiment with which we can hardly imagine Chaucer to have been in sympathy. As a matter of fact, the lyric verse which lightens up the three hundred years from the Conquest to Chaucer, has a daintiness and grace which show that the poetic sense of England was by no means dead. _Sumer is icumen in, Lenten is come with love to toune, Of one that is so fair and bright_, and numberless other songs with which recent anthologies have made everyone familiar are sufficient evidence of this. But these are chance flowers blossoming haphazard beside the dusty highway. One well-beaten track, it is true, does lead us through green glades and meadows enamelled with eye-pleasing flowers to the mysterious depths of enchanted forests haunted by fell enchanters and baleful dragons, but the metrical romances are for the most part more or less direct translations from French originals, and show little that is distinctively English, beyond a tendency to cut the sentiment and come to the story.[33] To French influence also we owe the development of satire. Old Norse and Icelandic poetry abound in instances of dry humour, but the Anglo-Saxon idea of repartee seems--if we may judge by pre-Conquest literature--to have consisted chiefly in such grim jests as baking the head of your enemy's son in a pie and inviting the father to dinner. Tenderness, passion, imagination, are to be found in such poems as _Beowulf_, the _Husband's Lament_, _Judith_, but it is not until French wit flashes across English seriousness that we travel to the Land of Cokaygne, where There are rivers great and fine Of oil, of milk, honey, and wine. Water serveth there for nothing Save to look at, and for washing: or listen to Hendyng's shrewd comments on human nature:-- Many a man saith, were he rich, There shoulde none be me y-lyche[34] To be good and free; But when he hath ought bygeten[35] All the freedom is forgeten And laid under knee. "He is free of his horse, that never had one," Quoth Hendyng. The prose of the period is still less inspiring than the poetry. Not even Chaucer discovered that prose-writing is an art. Works of any importance were written in Latin, and such English prose as there was, consisted in sermons, lives of the saints, etc. Now and then some author happens upon a telling phrase or an apt illustration, but such instances are few and obviously accidental. French influence was too strong for native literature to put forth any very vigorous shoots of its own, and attempts to force homilies, scientific treatises, and historical records into French rhyme forms led to the production of such dreary works as the _Cursor Mundi_ or Layamon's _Brut_.