In interest, bulk, and importance these two stories--the Story of the Destruction of Troy and the Alexandreid--far outstrip all the other romances of antiquity; they are more accessible than the rest, and have been the subject of far more careful investigation by modern students. Little has been added, or is likely to be added, in regard to the Troy-books generally, since M. Joly's introduction to Benoit's _Roman de Troie_ six-and-twenty years ago,[70] and it is at least improbable that much will be added to M. Paul Meyer's handling of the old French treatments of the Alexandreid in his _Alexandre le Grand dans la Litterature Francaise au Moyen Age_.[71] For it must once more be said that the pre-eminence of French over other literatures in this volume is not due to any crotchet of the writer, or to any desire to speak of what he has known pretty thoroughly, long, and at first-hand, in preference to that which he knows less thoroughly, less of old, and in parts at second-hand. It is the simplest truth to say that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries France kept the literary school of Europe, and that, with the single exception of Iceland, during a part, and only a part, of the time, all the nations of Europe were content to do, each in its own tongue, and sometimes even in hers, the lessons which she taught, the exercises which she set them. That the scholars sometimes far surpassed their masters is quite true, and is nothing unusual; that they were scholars is simple fact. [Footnote 70: _Le Roman de Troie._ Par Benoit de Sainte-More. Ed. Joly. Paris, 1870.] [Footnote 71: Paris, 1886. The number of monographs on this subject is, however, very large, and I should like at least to add Mr Wallis Budge's _Alexander the Great_ (the Syriac version of Callisthenes), Cambridge, 1889, and his subsequent _Life and Exploits of Alexander_.] [Sidenote: _Callisthenes._]