society for whose guidance they were made.  They are worth reading, and any one who likes may read them to this day, with considerable scepticism about their genuineness.  The doubt is only ignorance.  We do not, and never can, know the twelfth-century woman, or, for that matter, any other woman, but we do know the literature she created; we know the art she lived in, and the religion she professed.  We can collect from them some idea why the Virgin Mary ruled, and what she was taken to be, by the world which worshipped her.

Mary of Champagne created the literature of courteous love.  She must have been about twenty years old when she married Count Henry and went to live at Troyes, not actually a queen in title, but certainly a queen in social influence.  In 1164, Champagne was a powerful country, and Troyes a centre of taste.  In Normandy, at the same date, William of Saint Pair and Wace were writing the poetry we know.  In Champagne the court poet was Christian of Troyes, whose poems were new when the churches of Noyon and Senlis and Saint Leu d’Esserent, and the fleche of Chartres, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, were building, at the same time with the Abbey of Vezelay, and before the church at Mantes.  Christian died not long after 1175, leaving a great mass of verse, much of which has survived, and which you can read more easily than you can read Dante or Petrarch, although both are almost modern compared with Christian.  The quality of this verse is something like the quality of the glass windows—­ conventional decoration; colours in conventional harmonies; refinement, restraint, and feminine delicacy of taste.  Christian has not the grand manner of the eleventh century, and never recalls the masculine strength of the “Chanson de Roland” or “Raoul de Cambrai.”  Even his most charming story, “Erec et Enide,” carries chiefly a moral of courtesy.  His is poet-laureate’s work, says M. Gaston Paris; the flower of a twelfth-century court and of twelfth-century French; the best example of an admirable language; but not lyric; neither strong, nor deep, nor deeply felt.  What we call tragedy is unknown to it.  Christian’s world is sky-blue and rose, with only enough red to give it warmth, and so flooded with light that even its mysteries count only by the clearness with which they are shown.

Among other great works, before Mary of France came to Troyes Christian had, toward 1160, written a “Tristan,” which is lost.  Mary herself, he says, gave him the subject of “Lancelot,” with the request or order to make it a lesson of “courteous love,” which he obeyed.  Courtesy has lost its meaning as well as its charm, and you might find the “Chevalier de la Charette” even more unintelligible than tiresome; but its influence was great in its day, and the lesson of courteous love, under the authority of Mary of Champagne, lasted for centuries as the standard of taste.  “Lancelot” was never finished, but later, not long after 1174, Christian