me and hear me and see me gladly, and brought me great profit. . . .  Thus, wherever I went, I made inquiry of the old knights and squires who had been at deeds of arms, and who were specially fit to speak thereof, and also of certain heralds in good credit for to verify and justify all matters.  Thus have I gotten together this lofty and noble history.”  This picture of Froissart and his work by his own hand would be incomplete without the addition of a characteristic anecdote.  In one of his excursions in search of adventures and stories, “he fell in at Pamiers with a good knight, Messire Espaing of Lyons, who had been in all the wars of the time, and managed the great affairs of princes.  They set out to travel together, Messire Espaing telling his comrade what he knew about the history of the places whereby they passed, and Froissart taking great care to ride close to him for to hear his words.  Every evening they halted at hostels where they drained flagons full of white wine as good as the good canon had ever drunk in his life; then, after drinking, so soon as the knight was weary of relating, the chronicler wrote down just the substance of his stories, so as to better leave remembrance of them for time to come, as there is no way of retaining so certain as writing down.”

There is no occasion to add to these quotations; they give the most correct idea that can be formed of Froissart’s chronicles and their literary merit as well as their historical value.

Philip de Commynes is quite another affair, and far more than Froissart, nay, than Joinville and Villehardouin.  He is a politician proficient in the understanding and handling of the great concerns and great personages of his time.  He served Charles the Rash and Louis XI.; and, after so trying an experience, he depicted them and passed judgment upon them with imperturbable clearsightedness and freedom of thought.  With the recital of events, as well as the portrayal of character, he mingles here and there the reflections, expressed in precise, firm, and temperate language, of a profound moralist, who sets before himself no other aim but that of giving his thoughts full utterance.  He has already been spoken of in the second volume of this History, in connection with his leaving the Duke of Burgundy’s service for that of Louis XI., and with his remarks upon the virtues as well as the vices of that able but unprincipled despot.  We will not go again over that ground.  As a king’s adviser, Commynes would have been as much in place at the side of Louis XIV. as at that of Louis XI.; as a writer, he, in the fifteenth century, often made history and politics speak a language which the seventeenth century would not have disowned.

Let us pass from the prose-writers of the middle ages to their poets.