Wild adventures, horrors and tragedies in any age were fondly dwelt upon in comparison with the insupportable monotony of contemporary life; but the Middle Ages made a stronger appeal than any. There was a perfect mania for medievalism. Nothing pleased overwrought imaginations more than to picture existence amid all the riot and magnificence of those more spacious days. How they would have rattled a sword and clanked a spur, how defiantly tilted their plume, how breathlessly loved and how destructively fought! Why did they not live in the joyous time when every minute brought an adventure instead of spilling one more drop from the cup of _ennui_, and when a man shaped his own ends according to his passions, throwing a curse to the poor and a madrigal to the fair? Then, all their life was not grey. Splendour of colour with ample grace of form decked out existence like a picture by Veronese. Costly satin vied with magnificent brocade; all was a riot of velvet and purple dyes, fur and old lace; drinking cups, worthy of giants, chiselled by a Cellini, offered wine worthy of the gods; swords were masterpieces of the finest Toledo; jewelled harness caparisoned fleet Arab horses; feasts were Gargantuan, jests more than Rabelaisian; and all this wonderful wealth of glittering colour was thrown into magnificent relief against the solemnity of antique battlements and the sombre shadows of Gothic architecture. This, apart from all innovations of dramatic form, was the secret of the delirious popularity of "Hernani," "Lucrèce Borgia," "Le Roi s'amuse," and the "Tour de Nesle," and of the craze for historical novels, verses in baroque metres, slouch hats _à la Buridan_, velvet pourpoints, daggers, mysterious draperies and massive chests, drinking cups made out of skulls, and illuminated breviaries of which Gautier makes such fun in "Les Jeunes France." To it we owe Balzac's splendid "Contes Drolatiques," Lassailly's "Roueries de Trialph," and Roger de Beauvoir's "L'Écolier de Cluny." Gautier in his early poems was as romanesque as any of his "Jeune France," as those who know his early poems must admit. "Débauche" is a frank orgy, and "Albertus" is a gem of the Gothic, with its supernatural setting, the "fatality" of its hero, the horror of its _dénouement_, the wild fantasy of its witches' chamber, and its amorous wealth of descriptive detail in which old fabrics, old furniture, swords, daggers, and hangings abound. Victor Hugo, above all, was the chosen bard of the Gothic and the romanesque. Besides his dramas, his "Odes et Ballades" were in the mouth of every child who could pay four halfpence for an hour's luxury in the _cabinet de lecture_; and schoolboys would declaim for hours in antiphon such passages as the invocation of "La Bande Noire":