The third of the most read books of the century, The Romance of the Rose, is not so well known except by scholars as is the Animal Epic or perhaps even the Golden Legend. Anyone who wants to understand the burden of the time, however, and who wishes to put himself in the mood and the tense to comprehend not only the other literature of the era, and in this must be included even Dante, but also the social, educational, and even scientific movements of the period, must become familiar with it. It has been well said that a knowledge and study of the three most read books of the century, those which we have named, will afford a far clearer insight into the daily life and the spirit working within the people for whom they were written, than the annals of the wars or political struggles that were waged during the same period between kings and nobles. For this clearer insight a knowledge of the Romance of the Rose is more important than of the others. It provides a better introduction to the customs and habits, the manners of thought and of action, the literary and educational interests of the people of the Thirteenth Century, than any mere history, however detailed, could. In this respect it resembles Homer who, as Froude declares, has given us a better idea of Greek life than a whole encyclopedia of classified information would have done. The intimate life stories of no other periods in history are so well illustrated, nor so readily to be comprehended, as those of Homer and the authors of the medieval Romaunt. The Romance of the Rose continued to be for more than two centuries the most read book in Europe. Every one with any pretense to scholarship or to literary taste in any European country considered it necessary to be familiar with it, and without exaggeration what Lowell once declared with regard to Don Quixote, that it would be considered a mark of lack of culture to miss a reference to it in any country in Europe, might well have been repeated during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries of the Romance of the Rose. It has in recent years been put into very suitable English dress by Mr. F. S. Ellis and published among the Temple Classics, thus placing it {216} within easy reach of English readers. Mr. Ellis must certainly be considered a suitable judge of the interest there is in the work. He spent several years in translating its two and twenty thousand six hundred and eight lines and yet considers that few books deserve as much attention as this typical Thirteenth Century allegory. He says: