The defects which distinguish almost all mediaeval poetry are no doubt discoverable here. There is some sophistication of the keeping in the episodes of Coart and Chanticleer, and the termination is almost too audacious in the sort of choice of happy or unhappy ending, triumph or defeat for the hero, which it leaves us. Yet this very audacity suits the whole scheme; and the part dealing with the death (or swoon) and burial is assuredly one of the best things of its kind in French, almost one of the best things in or out of it. The contrast between the evident delight of the beasts at getting rid of Renart and their punctilious discharge of ceremonial duties, the grave parody of rites and conventions, remind us more of Swift or Lucian than of any French writer, even Rabelais or Voltaire. It happened that some ten or twelve years had passed between the time when the present writer had last opened _Renart_ (except for mere reference now and then) and the time when he refreshed his memory of it for the purposes of the present volume. It is not always in such cases that the second judgment exactly confirms the first; but here, not merely in the instance of this particular branch but almost throughout, I can honestly say that I put down the _Roman de Renart_ with even a higher idea of its literary merit than that with which I had taken it up. [Sidenote: _The_ Romance of the Rose.] The second great romance which distinguishes the thirteenth century in France stands, as we may say, to one side of the _Roman de Renart_ as the _fabliaux_ do to the other side. But, though complex in fewer pieces, the _Roman de la Rose_[142] is, like the _Roman de Renart_, a complex, not a single work; and its two component parts are distinguished from one another by a singular change of tone and temper. It is the later and larger part of the _Rose_ which brings it close to _Renart_: the smaller and earlier is conceived in a spirit entirely different, though not entirely alien, and one which, reinforcing the satiric drift of the _fabliaux_ and _Renart_ itself, influenced almost the entire literary production in _belles lettres_ at least, and sometimes out of them, for more than two centuries throughout Europe. [Footnote 142: Ed. Michel. Paris, 1864. One of the younger French scholars, who, under the teaching of M. Gaston Paris, have taken in hand various sections of mediaeval literature, M. Langlois, has bestowed much attention on the _Rose_, and has produced a monograph on it, _Origines et Sources du Roman de la Rose_. Paris, 1890.]