Variety of incident, remoteness of scene, and all the incredible things in the world, had been at the disposal of medieval authors long before the French Romantic Schools began to define themselves. The wonders of the East, especially, had very early come into literature; and the Anglo-Saxon _Epistle of Alexander_ seems to anticipate the popular taste for Eastern stories, just as the Anglo-Saxon version of _Apollonius of Tyre_ anticipates the later importation of Greek romance, and the appropriation of classical rhetoric, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; as the grace and brightness of the old English poems of St. Andrew or St. Helen seem to anticipate the peculiar charm of some of the French poems of adventures. In French literature before the vogue of romance can be said to have begun, and before the epic form had lost its supremacy, the poem of the _Pilgrimage of Charlemagne_, one of the oldest extant poems of the heroic cycle, is already far gone in subjection to the charm of mere unqualified wonder and exaggeration--rioting in the wonders of the East, like the Varangians on their holiday, when they were allowed a free day to loot in the Emperor's palace.[79] The poem of Charlemagne's journey to Constantinople is unrefined enough, but the later and more elegant romances deal often in the same kind of matter. Mere furniture counts for a good deal in the best romances, and they are full of descriptions of riches and splendours. The story of Troy is full of details of various sorts of magnificence; the city of Troy itself and "Ylion," its master-tower, were built by Priam out of all kinds of marble, and covered with sculpture all over. Much further on in Benoit's poem (l. 14,553) Hector is brought home wounded to a room which is described in 300 lines, with particulars of its remarkable decorations, especially its four magical images. The tomb of Penthesilea (l. 25,690) is too much for the author:-- Sepolture ot et monument Tant que se _Plenius_ fust vis Ou _cil qui fist Apocalis_ Nel vos sauroient il retraire: Por ço si m'en dei gie bien taire: N'en dirai plus, que n'oseroie; Trop halte chose envaïroie. [Footnote 79: See the account of the custom in the _Saga of Harald Hardrada_, c. 16. "Harald entrusted to Jarizleif all the gold that he had sent from Micklegarth, and all sorts of precious things: so much wealth all together, as no man of the North Lands had ever seen before in one man's hands. Harald had thrice come in for the palace-sweeping (_Polotasvarf_) while he was in Micklegarth. It is the law there that when the Greek king dies, the Varangians shall have a sweep of the palace; they go over all the king's palaces where his treasures are, and every man shall have for his own what falls to his hand" (_Fornmanna Sögur_, vi. p. 171).]