something parallel in _Ivanhoe_), and it would have been a somewhat violent escapade for even a mediaeval fancy. [Footnote 84: The British Museum alone (see Mr Ward's _Catalogue of Romances_, vol. i.) contains some seventeen separate MSS. of Dares.] So, with that customary and restless ability to which we owe so much, and which has been as a rule so much slighted, it seized on the negative capacities of the story. Dares gives a wretched painting, but a tolerable canvas and frame. Each section of his meagre narrative is capable of being worked out by sufficiently busy and imaginative operators into a complete _roman d'aventures_: his facts, if meagre and jejune, are numerous. The raids and reprisals in the cases of Hesione and Helen suited the demands of the time; and, as has been hinted, the singular interlardings of truce and war, and the shutting up of the latter into so many days' hand-to-hand fighting,--with no strategy, no care for communications, no scientific nonsense of any kind,--were exactly to mediaeval taste. [Sidenote: _Troilus and Briseida._] Above all, the prominence of new heroes and heroines, about whom not very much was said, and whose _gestes_ the mediaeval writer could accordingly fill up at his own will, with the presentation of others in a light different from that of the classical accounts, was a godsend. Achilles, as the principal author of the "Excidium Trojae" (the title of the Dares book, and after it of others), must be blackened; and though Dares himself does not contain the worst accusations of the mediaeval writers against the unshorn son of the sea-goddess, it clears the way for them by taking away the excuse of the unjust deprivation of Briseis. From this to making him not merely a factious partisan, but an unfair fighter, who mobs his enemies half to death with Myrmidons before he engages them himself, is not far. On the other hand, Troilus, a mere name in the older stories, offers himself as a hero. And for a heroine, the casual mention of the charms of Briseida in Dares started the required game. Helen was too puzzling, as well as too Greek; Andromache only a faithful wife; Cassandra a scolding sorceress; Polyxena a victim. Briseida had almost a clear record, as after the confusion with Chryseis (to be altered in name afterwards) there was very little personality left in her, and she could for that very reason be dealt with as the romancers pleased.