We may therefore with advantage, having made this digression to comply a little with prevalent fashions, return to the _chansons_ themselves, to the half-million or million verses of majestic cadence written in one of the noblest languages, for at least first effect, to be found in the history of the world, possessing that character of distinction, of separate and unique peculiarity in matter and form, which has such extraordinary charm, and endowed besides, more perhaps than any other division, with the attraction of presenting an utterly vanished Past. The late Mr Froude found in church-bells--the echo of the Middle Ages--suggestion of such a vanishing. To some of us there is nothing dead in church-bells; there is only in them, as in the Arthurian legends, for instance, a perennial thing still presented in associations, all the more charming for being slightly antique. But the _chansons de geste_, living by the poetry of their best examples, by the fire of their sentiment, by the clash and clang of their music, are still in thought, in connection with manners, hopes, aims, almost more dead than any of the classics. The literary misjudgment of them which was possible in quite recent times, to two such critics--very different, but each of the first class--as Mr Matthew Arnold and M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, is half excused by this curious feature in their own literary character. More than mummies or catacombs, more than Herculaneum and Pompeii, they bring us face to face with something so remote and afar that we can hardly realise it at all. It may be that that peculiarity of the French genius, which, despite its unsurpassed and almost unmatched literary faculty, has prevented it from contributing any of the very greatest masterpieces to the literature of the world, has communicated to them this aloofness, this, as it may almost be called, provincialism. But some such note there is in them, and it may be that the immense stretch of time during which they were worse than unknown--misknown--has brought it about. [Sidenote: _Their charm._] Yet their interest is not the less; it is perhaps even the more. It is nearly twenty years since I began to read them, and during that period I have also been reading masses of other literature from other times, nations, and languages; yet I cannot at this moment take up one without being carried away by the stately language, as precise and well proportioned as modern French, yet with much of the grandeur which modern French lacks, the statelier metre, the noble phrase, the noble incident and passion. Take, for instance, one of the crowning moments, for there are several, of the death-scene of Roland, that where the hero discovers the dead archbishop, with his hands--"the white, the beautiful"--crossed on his breast:--