A higher level of interest and significance is reached by JOINVILLE in his Vie de Saint Louis, written towards the close of the century.  The fascination of the book lies in its human qualities.  Joinville narrates, in the easy flowing tone of familiar conversation, his reminiscences of the good king in whose service he had spent the active years of his life, and whose memory he held in adoration.  The deeds, the words, the noble sentiments, the saintly devotion of Louis—­these things he relates with a charming and ingenuous sympathy, yet with a perfect freedom and an absolute veracity.  Nor is it only the character of his master that Joinville has brought into his pages; his book is as much a self-revelation as a biography.  Unlike Villehardouin, whose chronicle shows hardly a trace of personal feeling, Joinville speaks of himself unceasingly, and has impressed his work indelibly with the mark of his own individuality.  Much of its charm depends upon the contrast which he thus almost unconsciously reveals between himself and his master—­the vivacious, common-sense, eminently human nobleman, and the grave, elevated, idealizing king.  In their conversations, recounted with such detail and such relish by Joinville, the whole force of this contrast becomes delightfully apparent.  One seems to see in them, compressed and symbolized in the characters of these two friends, the conflicting qualities of sense and spirit, of worldliness and self-immolation, of the most shrewd and literal perspicacity and the most visionary exaltation, which make up the singular antithesis of the Middle Ages.

A contrast no less complete, though of a different nature, is to be found in the most important poetical work of the thirteenth century—­Le Roman de la Rose.  The first part of this curious poem was composed by GUILLAUME DE LORRIS, a young scholar who wrote for that aristocratic public which, in the previous generation, had been fascinated by the courtly romances of Chretien de Troyes.  Inspired partly by that writer, and partly by Ovid, it was the aim of Lorris to produce an Art of Love, brought up to date, and adapted to the tastes of his aristocratic audience, with all the elaborate paraphernalia of learned disquisition and formal gallantry which was then the mode.  The poem, cast in the form of an intricate allegory, is of significance chiefly on account of its immense popularity, and for its being the fountain-head of a school of allegorical poetry which flourished for many centuries in France.  Lorris died before he had finished his work, which, however, was destined to be completed in a singular manner.  Forty years later, another young scholar, JEAN DE MEUNG, added to the 4000 lines which Lorris had left no fewer than 18,000 of his own.  This vast addition was not only quite out of proportion but also quite out of tone with the original work.  Jean de Meung abandoned entirely the refined and aristocratic atmosphere of his predecessor, and wrote with all