The weakness of the drama in the French epics, even more than their compliance with foreign romance in the choice of incidents or machinery, is against their claim to be reckoned in the higher order of heroic narrative. They are romantic by the comparative levity of their imagination; the story, with them, is too much for the personages. But it is still the problem of heroic character that engages them, however feebly or conventionally they may deal with it. They rely, like the Teutonic epic and the Sagas, on situations that test the force of character, and they find those situations in the common conditions of an heroic age, subject of course to the modifications of the comparatively late period and late form of society to which they belong. _Roland_ is a variation on the one perpetual heroic theme; it has a grander setting, a grander accompaniment, than _Byrhtnoth_ or _Waldere_, but it is essentially the old story of the heroic age,--no knight-errantry, but the last resistance of a man driven into a corner. The greatness of the poem of _Roland_ is that of an author who knows his own mind, who has a certain mood of the heroic imagination to express, and is at no loss for his instrument or for the lines of his work. The poem, as has been already noted, has a general likeness in its plan to the story of Finnesburh as told in _Beowulf_, and to the poems of the death of Attila. The plot falls into two parts, the second part being the vengeance and expiation. Although the story is thus not absolutely simple, like the adventures of Beowulf, no epic has a more magnificent simplicity of effect. The other personages, Charlemagne, Ganelon, Oliver, King Marsile, have to Roland nothing like the importance of Agamemnon, Ajax, Diomede, or Hector, as compared with Achilles in the _Iliad_. The poem is almost wholly devoted to the praise and glorification of a single hero; it retains very much of the old manners of the earlier stages of epic poetry, before it ceased to be lyric. It is a poem in honour of a chieftain.