[Sidenote: _Its complications._] But from this, at least in the French versions, the branches diverge, cross, and repeat or contradict each other with an altogether bewildering freedom. Sometimes, for long passages together, as in the interesting fytte, "How Reynard hid himself among the Skins,"[141] the author seems to forget the general purpose altogether, and to devote himself to something quite different--in this case the description of the daily life and pursuits of a thirteenth-century sportsman of easy means. Often the connection with the general story is kept only by the introduction of the most obvious and perfunctory devices--an intrigue with Dame Hersent, a passing trick played on Isengrim, and so forth. [Footnote 141: Meon, iii. 82; Martin, ii. 43.] [Sidenote: _Unity of spirit._] [Sidenote: _The Rise of Allegory._] Nevertheless the whole is knit together, to a degree altogether unusual in a work of such magnitude, due to many different hands, by an extraordinary unity of tone and temper. This tone and this temper are to some extent conditioned by the Rise of Allegory, the great feature, in succession to the outburst of Romance, of our present period. We do not find in the original _Renart_ branches the abstracting of qualities and the personification of abstractions which appear in later developments, and which are due to the popularity of the _Romance of the Rose_, if it be not more strictly correct to say that the popularity of the _Romance of the Rose_ was due to the taste for allegory. Jacquemart Gielee, the author of _Renart le Nouvel_, might personify _Renardie_ and work his beast-personages into knights of tourney; the clerk of Troyes, who later wrote _Renart le Contrefait_, might weave a sort of encyclopaedia into his piece. But the authors of the "Ancien Renart" knew better. With rare lapses, they exhibit wonderful art in keeping their characters beasts, while assigning to them human arts; or rather, to put the matter with more correctness, they pass over the not strictly beast-like performances of Renart and the others with such entire unconcern, with such a perfect freedom from tedious after-thought of explanation, that no sense of incongruity occurs. The illustrations of Meon's _Renart_, which show us the fox painfully clasping in his forelegs a stick four times his own length, show the inferiority of the nineteenth century. Renart may beat _le vilain_ (everybody beats the poor _vilain_) as hard as he likes in the old French text; it comes all naturally. A neat copper-plate engraving, in the best style of sixty or seventy years ago, awakes distrust. [Sidenote: _The satire of_ Renart.]