allowed himself to be distracted between opposite kinds of story, between the school of Ovid and the school of Blethericus; and who, even in _Cliges_, was less consistently modern than his Provençal follower. [Footnote 88: Ed. Paul Meyer, 1865, and, again, 1901.] _Flamenca_ is the perfection and completion of medieval romance in one kind and in one direction. It is all sentiment; the ideal courtly sentiment of good society and its poets, made lively by the author's knowledge of his own time and its manners, and his decision not to talk about anything else. It is perhaps significant that he allows his heroine the romance of _Flores and Blanchefleur_ for her reading, an older story of true lovers, after the simpler pattern of Greek romance, which the author of _Flamenca_ apparently feels himself entitled to refer to with the condescension of a modern and critical author towards some old-fashioned prettiness. He is completely self-possessed and ironical with regard to his story. His theme is the idle love whose origin is explained by Ovid; his personages are nothing to him but the instruments of the symphony which he composes and directs: _sopra lor vanità che par persona_, over and through their graceful inanity, passes the stream of sentiment, the shifting, flickering light which the Provençal author has borrowed from Ovid and transferred for his own purposes to his own time. It is perhaps the first complete modern appropriation of classical examples in literary art; for the poem of _Flamenca_ is classical in more than one sense of the term--classical, not only because of its comprehension of the spirit of the Latin poet and his code of manners and sentiment, but because of its clear proportions and its definite abstract lines of composition; because of the self-possession of the author and his subordination of details and rejection of irrelevances. Many things are wanting to _Flamenca_ which it did not suit the author to bring in. It was left to other greater writers to venture on other and larger schemes with room for more strength and individuality of character, and more stress of passion, still keeping the romantic framework which had been designed by the masters of the twelfth century, and also very much of the sentimental language which the same masters had invented and elaborated.