Next after the tale of Troy, the career of Alexander was at this period the most popular subject for poetry, romance, or chronicle. The Grecian conqueror filled a vast space in the imagination. He was the centre of marvel and of history. Every modern literature, according to its development, testifies to this predominance. Even dialects testify. In France, the professors of grammar at Toulouse were directed by statutes of the University, dated 1328, to read to their pupils "De Historiis Alexandri."[51] In England, during the reign of Henry I., the sheriff was ordered to procure the Queen's chamber at Nottingham to be painted with the History of Alexander,--"_Depingi facias Historiam Alexandri undiquaque_."[52] Chaucer, in his "House of Fame," places Alexander with Hercules, and then again shows the universality of his renown:-- "Alisaundres storie is so commune, That everie wight that hath discrecioune Hath herde somewhat or al of his fortune." We have the excellent authority of the poet Gray for saying that the Alexandrine verse, which "like a wounded snake drags its slow length along," took its name from an early poem in this measure, called "La View d'Alexandre." There was also the "Roman d'Alexandre," contemporary with the "Alexandreis," which Gray thinks was borrowed from the latter poem, apparently because the authors say that they took it from the Latin.[53] There was also "The Life and Actions of Alexander the Macedonian," originally written in Greek, by Simeon Seth, magister and protovestiary or wardrobe-keeper of the palace at Constantinople in 1070, and translated from Greek into Latin, and then into French, Italian, and German.[54] Arabia also contributed her stories, and the Grecian conqueror became a hero of romance. Like Charlemagne, he had his twelve peers; and he also had a horn, through which he gave the word of command, which took sixty men to blow it, and was heard sixty miles,--being the same horn which afterwards Orlando sounded at Roncesvalles. That great career which was one of the epochs of mankind,--which carried in its victorious march the Greek language and Greek civilization,--which at the time enlarged the geography of the world, and opened the way to India,--was overlaid by an incongruous mass of fable and anachronism, so that the real story was lost. Times, titles, and places were confounded. Monks and convents, churches and confessors, were mixed with the achievements of the hero; and in an early Spanish History of Alexander, by John Lorenzo, we meet such characters as Don Phoebus, the Emperor Jupiter, and the Count Don Demosthenes; and we are assured that the mother of Alexander fled to a convent of Benedictine nuns.