The romances of Charlemagne, or, to employ their more technical designation, the _chansons de geste_, form a large, a remarkably homogeneous, and a well-separated body of compositions. These, as far as can be decided, date in time from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, with a few belated representatives in the fourteenth; but scarcely, as far as probability shows, with any older members in the tenth. Very little attention of any kind was paid to them, till some seventy years ago, an English scholar, Conybeare, known for his services to our own early literature, following the example of another scholar, Tyrwhitt, still earlier and more distinguished, had drawn attention to the merit and interest of, as it happens, the oldest and most remarkable of all. This was the _Chanson de Roland_, which, in this oldest form, exists only in one of the MSS. of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. But they very soon received the care of M. Paulin Paris, the most indefatigable student that in a century of examination of the older European literature any European country has produced, and after more than half a century of enthusiastic resuscitation by M. Paris, by his son M. Gaston, and by others, the whole body of them has been thoroughly overhauled and put at the disposal of those who do not care to read the original, in the four volumes of the remodelled edition of M. Leon Gautier's _Epopees Francaises_, while perhaps a majority of the actual texts are in print. This is as well, for though a certain monotony is always charged against the _chansons de geste_[16] by those who do not love them, and may be admitted to some extent even by those who do, there are few which have not a more or less distinct character of their own; and even the generic character is not properly to be perceived until a considerable number have been studied. [Footnote 16: This monotony almost follows from the title. For _geste_ in the French is not merely the equivalent of _gesta_, "deeds." It is used for the record of those deeds, and then for the whole class or family of performances and records of them. In this last sense the _gestes_ are in chief three--those of the king, of Doon de Mayence, and of Garin de Montglane--besides smaller ones.] [Sidenote: _Their distinguishing character._]