And, in the second place, the singular combination of anonymity and school-character in the most characteristic mediaeval literature makes it easier, vast as is its mass and in some cases conspicuous as is its merit, to handle in small space than later work. Only by a wild indulgence in guessing or a tedious minuteness of attention to _Lautlehre_ and rhyme-lists is it possible to make a treatment of even a named person like Chrestien de Troyes on the scale of a notice of Dante or even Froissart, and this without reference to the comparative literary importance of the three. The million lines of the _chansons de geste_ do not demand discussion in anything like direct proportion to their bulk. One _fabliau_, much more one minnesong or troubadour lyric, has a far greater resemblance of kind to its fellows than even one modern novel, even one nineteenth-century minor poem, to another. As the men write in schools, so they can be handled in them. Yet I should hope that it must have been already made apparent how very far the present writer is from undervaluing the period with which he has essayed to deal. He might perhaps be regarded as overvaluing it with more apparent reason--not, I think, with any reason that is more than apparent. For this was the time, if not of the Birth--the exact times and seasons of literary births no man knoweth--at any rate of the first appearance, full-blown or full-fledged, of Romance. Many praiseworthy folk have made many efforts to show that Romance was after all no such new thing--that there is Romance in the _Odyssey_, Romance in the choruses of AEschylus, Romance East and West, North and South, before the Middle Ages. They are only less unwise than the other good folk who endeavour to tie Romance down to a Teutonic origin, or a Celtic, or in the other sense a Romance one, to Chivalry (which was in truth rather its offspring than its parent), to this, and that, and the other. "All the best things in literature," it has been said, "are returns"; and this is perfectly true, just as it is perfectly true in another sense that all the best things in literature are novelties. In this particular growth, being as it was a product of the unchanging human mind, there were notes, doubtless, of Homer and of AEschylus, of Solomon the son of David and of Jesus the son of Sirach. But the constituents of the mixture were newly grouped; elements which had in the past been inconspicuous or dormant assumed prominence and activity; and the whole was new.