which has at all times secured the popularity of great works of literature. It holds the mirror up firmly and fully to its age. As we find in Rabelais the characteristics of the Renaissance, in Montaigne those of the sceptical reaction from Renaissance and reform alike, in Moliere those of the society of France after Richelieu had tamed and levelled it, in Voltaire and Rousseau respectively the two aspects of the great revolt,--so there are to be found in the _Roman de la rose_ the characteristics of the later middle age, its gallantry, its mysticism, its economical and social troubles and problems, its scholastic methods of thought, its naive acceptance as science of everything that is written, and at the same time its shrewd and indiscriminate criticism of much that the age of criticism has accepted without doubt or question. The _Roman de la rose_, as might be supposed, set the example of an immense literature of allegorical poetry, which flourished more and more until the Renaissance. Some of these poems we have already mentioned, some will have to be considered under the head of the 15th century. But, as usually happens in such cases and was certain to happen in this case, the allegory which has seemed tedious to many, even in the original, became almost intolerable in the majority of the imitations. Early didactic verse. Artificial forms of verse. We have observed that, at least in the later section of the _Roman de la rose_, there is observable a tendency to import into the poem indiscriminate erudition. This tendency is now remote from our poetical habits; but in its own day it was only the natural result of the use of poetry for all literary purposes. It was many centuries before prose became recognized as the proper vehicle for instruction, and at a very early date verse was used as well for educational and moral as for recreative and artistic purposes. French verse was the first born of all literary mediums in modern European speech, and the resources of ancient learning were certainly not less accessible in France than in any other country. Dante, in his _De vulgari eloquio_, acknowledges the excellence of the didactic writers of the Langue d'Oil. We have already alluded to the _Bestiary_ of Philippe de Thaun, a Norman trouvere who lived and wrote in England during the reign of Henry Beauclerc. Besides the _Bestiary_, which from its dedication to Queen Adela has been conjectured to belong to the third decade of the 12th century, Philippe wrote also in French a _Liber de creaturis_, both works being translated from the Latin. These works of mystical and apocryphal physics and zoology became extremely popular in the succeeding centuries, and were frequently imitated. A moralizing turn was also given to them, which was much helped by the importation of several miscellanies of Oriental origin, partly tales, partly didactic in character, the most celebrated of which is the _Roman des sept sages_, which, under that title and the