In the fourteenth century most of these old romances, heroic, forceful, or touching, had been re-cast and put into new language; florid descriptions, complicated adventures, marvels and prodigies had been added to them; many had been turned into prose, and instead of being sung they were read.[249] The lord listened with pleasure, and his taste, palled by surfeit, caused him to take delight in the strange entanglements with which every event was henceforth enveloped. He now lived a more complex life than formerly; being more refined he had more wants, and grand, simple pictures in poems like the Song of Roland no longer satisfied his imagination: he preferred variety to grandeur. The heroes of romance {197} found harder and harder tasks imposed on them, and were obliged to triumph over more and more marvellous enchantments. As the hand became more alert the modelling improved; the softer-hearted heroes of amorous adventures were endowed by the poet with that charm, at once mystic and sensual, so characteristic of the sculptured figures of the fourteenth century. The author of “Sir Gawayne” takes a scarcely concealed pleasure in describing the visits which his knight receives, in painting his lady, so gentle, so pretty, with easy motions and gay smile; he puts into his picture all his art, all his soul; he finds words which seem caresses, and verses which shine as with a golden gleam.[250] These pictures, not rare in the thirteenth century, greatly multiplied in the fourteenth, but toward the end thereof passed from the romance into the tale, or into poems, half tale, half romance, such as the “Troilus” of Chaucer. After many transformations the metrical romance was gradually giving way to new forms and styles which better suited the tastes of the hour. A hundred years earlier such a man as Chaucer would have taken up the Arthur legends in his turn, and would have written some splendid long-winded poetical romance for the minstrels; but he left us tales and lyric poems because his own taste and that of the age were different, and he felt that people were still curious but not enthusiastic about old heroic stories, that few any longer followed them with passion to the end, and that they were rather made the ornament of libraries than the subject of daily thought.[251] Thenceforward men liked to find separately in {198} ballads and in tales the lyric breath and the spirit of observation formerly contained with all the rest in the great metrical romances, the poetical _summæ_ of earlier days; and these, abandoned to the less expert of the itinerant rhymers, became such wretched copies of the old originals that they were the laughing-stock of people of sense and taste.