the realism and coarseness of the middle class of that day.  Lorris’s vapid allegory faded into insignificance, becoming a mere peg for a huge mass of extraordinarily varied discourse.  The whole of the scholastic learning of the Middle Ages is poured in a confused stream through this remarkable and deeply interesting work.  Nor is it merely as a repository of medieval erudition that Jean de Meung’s poem deserves attention; for it is easy to perceive in it an intellectual tendency far in advance of its age—­a spirit which, however trammelled by antiquated conventions, yet claims kinship with that of Rabelais, or even that of Voltaire.  Jean de Meung was not a great artist; he wrote without distinction, and without sense of form; it is his bold and voluminous thought that gives him a high place in French literature.  In virtue alike of his popularization of an encyclopedic store of knowledge and of his underlying doctrine—­the worship of Nature—­he ranks as a true forerunner of the great movement of the Renaissance.

The intellectual stirring, which seemed to be fore-shadowed by the second part of the Roman de la Rose, came to nothing.  The disasters and confusion of the Hundred Years War left France with very little energy either for art or speculation; the horrors of a civil war followed; and thus the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are perhaps the emptiest in the annals of her literature.  In the fourteenth century one great writer embodied the character of the time.  FROISSART has filled his splendid pages with ’the pomp and circumstance of glorious war’.  Though he spent many years and a large part of his fortune in the collection of materials for his history of the wars between France and England, it is not as an historian that he is now remembered; it is as a writer of magnificent prose.  His Chroniques, devoid of any profundity of insight, any true grasp of the movements of the age, have rarely been paralleled in the brilliance and animation of their descriptions, the vigour of their character-drawing, the flowing picturesqueness of their style.  They unroll themselves like some long tapestry, gorgeously inwoven with scenes of adventure and chivalry, with flags and spears and chargers, and the faces of high-born ladies and the mail-clad figures of knights.  Admirable in all his descriptions, it is in his battle-pieces that Froissart particularly excels.  Then the glow of his hurrying sentences redoubles, and the excitement and the bravery of the combat rush out from his pen in a swift and sparkling stream.  One sees the serried ranks and the flashing armour, one hears the clash of weapons and the shouting of the captains:  ’Montjoie!  Saint Denis!  Saint George!  Giane!’—­one feels the sway and the press and the tumult, one laments with the vanquished, one exults with the victors, and, amid the glittering panoply of ’grand seigneur, conte, baron, chevalier, et escuier’, with their high-sounding titles and their gallant prowess, one forgets the reverse side of all this glory—­the ravaged fields, the smoking villages, the ruined peasants—­the long desolation of France.