[Footnote 135: _Early English Prose Romances_ (2d ed., London, 1858), i. 71. The text of this is only Deloney's and sixteenth century, but much of the matter must be far earlier.] [Footnote 136: Weber, iii. 177.] [Sidenote: _Effect of the_ fabliaux _on language._] For in these curious compositions the _esprit Gaulois_ found itself completely at home; indeed some have held that here it hit upon its most characteristic and peculiar development. The wonderful faculty for expression--for giving, if not the supreme, yet the adequate and technically masterly dress to any kind of literary production--which has been the note of French literature throughout, and which was never more its note than at this time, enabled the language, as we have seen and shall see, to keep as by an easy sculling movement far ahead of all its competitors. But in other departments, with one or two exceptions, the union of temper and craft, of inspiration and execution, was not quite perfect. Here there was no misalliance. As the language lost the rougher, fresher music which gives such peculiar attraction to the _chansons_, as it disused itself to the varied trills, the half-inarticulate warblings which constitute the charm of the lyrics, so it acquired the precision, the flexibility, the _nettete_, which satiric treatment of the follies and evil chances of life, the oddities of manners and morals, require. It became bright, if a little hard, easy, if a little undistinguished, capable of slyness, of innuendo, of "malice," but not quite so capable as it had been of the finer and vaguer suggestions and aspirations. [Sidenote: _And on narrative._] Above all, these _fabliaux_ served as an exercise-ground for the practice in which French was to become almost if not quite supreme, the practice of narrative. In the longer romances, which for a century or a century and a half preceded the _fabliaux_, the art of narration, as has been more than once noticed, was little attended to, and indeed had little scope. The _chansons_ had a common form, or something very like it, which almost dispensed the _trouvere_ from devoting much pains to the individual conduct of the story. The most abrupt transitions were accustomed, indeed expected; minor incidents received very little attention; the incessant fighting secured the attention of the probable hearers by itself; the more grandiose and striking incidents--the crowning of Prince Louis and the indignation of William at his sister's ingratitude, for instance--were not "engineered" or led up to in any way, but left to act in mass and by assault. [Sidenote: _Conditions of_ fabliau-_writing._]