Nevertheless, the attractions, intrinsic and extrinsic, of the division are neither few nor small. This very confusion, as it seems nowadays, this extraordinary and almost monstrous blending of uncritical history and unbridled romance, shows one of the most characteristic sides of the whole matter, and exhibits, as do few other things, that condition of mediaeval thought in regard to all critical questions which has so constantly to be insisted on. As in the case of the Arthurian story, the matter thus presented caught hold of the mediaeval imagination with a remarkable grip, and some of the most interesting literary successions of all history date from it. Among them it is almost enough to mention the chain of names--Benoit de Sainte-More, Guido Colonna, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henryson--which reaches Shakespeare, and does not cease with him, all successively elaborating the history of Troilus and Cressida. The lively story, first formed, like so many others, by the French genius, and well, if rather impudently, copied by Colonna; Boccaccio's vivid Italian Cressida; Chaucer's inimitable Pandarus, the first pleasing example of the English talent for humorous portrayal in fiction; the wonderful passage, culminating in a more wonderful single line,[69] of that Dunfermline schoolmaster whom some inconceivable person has declared to be only a poet to "Scotch patriotism"; the great gnomic verses of Shakespeare's Ulysses, and the various, unequal, sometimes almost repulsive, never otherwise than powerful, pageantry of that play, which has been perhaps more misjudged than any other of Shakespeare's,--all these spring from the Tale of Troy, not in the least as handed down by the ancients, but tricked and frounced as the Middle Age was wont. Nor is this half-borrowed interest by any means the only one. The Cressid story, indeed, does not reach its full attraction as a direct subject of literary treatment till the fourteenth century. But the great Alexander cycle gives us work which merely as poetry equals all but the very best mediaeval work, and its importance in connection with the famous metre named from it is of itself capital. [Footnote 69: "Than upon him scho kest up baith her ene, And with ane blunk it came in to his thocht, That he sumtyme hir face before had sene. * * * * * Ane sparke of lufe than till his hart culd spring, And kendlit all his bodie in ane fyre With heit fevir, ane sweit and trimbilling Him tuik quhile he was readie to expire; To beir his scheild his breast began to tyre: Within ane quhyle he changit mony hew, _And nevertheles not ane ane uther knew_." Laing's _Poems of Henryson_ (Edinburgh, 1865), p. 93. This volume is unfortunately not too common; but 'The Testament and Complaint of Cressid' may also be found under Chaucer in Chalmers's Poets (i. 298 for this passage).] [Sidenote: _The Alexandreid._]