In this odd piece, which, except the description of Marie the deserted wife, has little poetical merit, we see drama of the particular kind in a much ruder and vaguer condition than in the parallel instance of _Robin et Marion_. There the very form of the _pastourelle_ was in a manner dramatic--it wanted little adjustment to be quite so; and though the _coda_ of the rustic merry-making is rather artless, it is conceivably admissible. Here we are not far out of Chaos as far as dramatic arrangement goes. Adam's announced desertion of his wife and intended journey to Paris lead to nothing: the episodes or scenes of the doctor and the monk are connected with nothing; the fool or madman and his father are equally independent; and the "meyney of Hellequin" simply play within the play, not without rhyme, but certainly with very little reason. Nevertheless the piece is almost more interesting than the comparatively regular farces (into which rather later the _fabliaux_ necessarily developed themselves) and than the miracle plays (which were in the same way dramatic versions of the Lives of the Saints), precisely because of this irregular and pillar-to-post character. We see that the author is trying a new kind, that he is endeavouring to create for himself. He is not copying anything in form; he is borrowing very little from any one in material. He has endeavoured to represent, and has not entirely failed in representing, the comings and goings, the ways and says, of his townsmen at fair and market. The curiously desultory character of this early drama--the character hit off most happily in modern times by _Wallenstein's Lager_--naturally appears here in an exaggerated form. But the root of the matter--the construction of drama, not on the model of Terence or of anybody, but on the model of life--is here. It will be for my successor to show the wide extension of this dramatic form in the succeeding period. Here it takes rank rather as having the interest of origins, and as helping to fill out the picture of the marvellously various ability of Frenchmen of letters in the thirteenth century, than for the positive bulk or importance of its constituents. And it is important to repeat that it connects itself in the general literary survey both with _fabliau_ and with allegory. The personifying taste, which bred or was bred from allegory, is very close akin to the dramatic taste, and the _fabliau_, as has been said more than once, is a farce in the making, and sometimes far advanced towards being completely made. [Sidenote: _Early French prose._]