youth some 23,000 verses before he attains to plucking the object of his affections. Yet it was this reading which inspired the earliest efforts of our Chaucer, and which, in his first stage, he fell to imitating. It was this literature which the cultivated Norman English delighted hugely to hear. Allegorical, also, and purely satirical is the prolonged beast-fable known as the _Roman de Renard_ (“the fox”), which enjoyed an immense vogue throughout Europe, and provoked countless imitations. One chief species of composition, and a highly important one, yet remains. This was the _fabliau_, the amusing tale in verse, the one kind of writing to let us know that the world was not wholly made of doughty knights and gentle damosels. The _fabliau_ is a tale of real or possible adventure in ordinary life, generally of a humorous kind. It is, in fact, a sort of novelette. Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_ are often _fabliaux_. From France the _fabliau_ was borrowed by the _Novellieri_ of Italy. It was taken up and developed by Boccaccio, and both directly from France and indirectly through Italy it made its way into the general stock of European narrative material. Had it not been for _fabliaux_, one might have thought that in those days there was nothing else for men to do but fight and love. Yet the great ordinary mass of mankind existed all the time, doing its sober work in towns and country places. And it was time for this great stratum to find recognition in _bourgeois_ story. Thus in northern France we have chiefly epics and romances of heroic adventures, allegories more or less satirical and didactic, and amusing tales; in southern France we have chiefly lyrics of love and chivalry. As time goes on, each half moves closer to the other, although during the whole epoch of the northern romances the Provençal spirit had combined with the Celtic to pervade them with a peculiar tone of chivalric sentiment. In 1249 the two geographical divisions became one kingdom. Before the middle of the fourteenth century the Provençal tongue begins to die, and its literature to perish. The story of French literature thenceforward is one and undivided. * * * * *