Rarely was the like seen in any literature; here is a poem dedicated to a Frenchwoman by a Norman of England, which begins with the praise of a Briton, a Saxon, and a Dane. The same phenomenon is to be noticed, after the Conquest in romances, chronicles and histories. Whoever the author may be, whether of French or English blood, the unity of origin of the two races receives almost invariably the fullest acknowledgment; the inhabitants of the great island cease to look towards Germany, Denmark and Scandinavia, for their ancestors or for the sources of their inspiration; they look rather, like their new French companions, to Rome, Greece and Troy. This policy produced not only momentous social results, but also very important literary consequences; the intellectual connection with the north being cut off, the Anglo-French allowed themselves to be drilled with the Latin discipline; the ancient models ceased to appear to them heterogeneous; they studied them in all good faith as the works of distant relations, with such result that they, unlike the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples, were ready, when the time of the Renaissance came, to benefit by the great intellectual movement set on foot by southern neo-classic nations; and while Italy produced Ariosto and Tasso, while Spain possessed Cervantes, and France Montaigne, Ronsard and Rabelais, they were ready to give birth to the unparalleled trio of Spenser, Bacon and Shakespeare. From the fourteenth century this conclusion was easy to foresee; for, even at that period, England took part in a tentative Renaissance that preceded the great one of the sixteenth century. At the time when Italy produced Petrarca and Boccaccio, and France had Froissart, England produced Chaucer, the greatest of the four. Famous as Chaucer was as a story-teller, it is strange that he was to have almost no influence on the development of the novel in England. When we read of Harry Bailly and the Wife of Bath, of the modest Oxford clerk and the good parson; when we turn the pages of the inimitable story of Troilus and the fickle, tender, charming Cressida, it seems as if nothing was lacking to the production of perfect novels. All the elements of the art are there complete: the delicate analysis of passions, the stirring plot, the natural play of various characters, the very human mixture of grossness and tenderness, of love songs and rough jokes, the portraits of actual beings belonging to real life and not to dreamland. It was only necessary to break the cadence of the verse and to write such stories in prose. No one did it; no one tried to do it. [Illustration: CAXTON'S REPRESENTATION OF CHAUCER'S PILGRIMS, 1484.]