Of course, this odour of true sanctity belongs only to the “Roman” of William of Lorris, which dates from the death of Queen Blanche and of all good things, about 1250; a short allegory of courteous love in forty-six hundred and seventy lines.  To modern taste, an allegory of forty-six hundred and seventy lines seems to be not so short as it might be; but the fourteenth century found five thousand verses totally inadequate to the subject, and, about 1300, Jean de Meung added eighteen thousand lines, the favourite reading of society for one or two hundred years, but beyond our horizon.  The “Roman” of William of Lorris was complete in itself; it had shape; beginning, middle, and end; even a certain realism, action,—­almost life!

The Rose is any feminine ideal of beauty, intelligence, purity, or grace,—­always culminating in the Virgin,—­but the scene is the Court of Love, and the action is avowedly in a dream, without time or place.  The poet’s tone is very pure; a little subdued; at times sad; and the poem ends sadly; but all the figures that were positively hideous were shut out of the court, and painted on the outside walls:—­Hatred; Felony; Covetousness; Envy; Poverty; Melancholy, and Old Age.  Death did not appear.  The passion for representing death in its horrors did not belong to the sunny atmosphere of the thirteenth century, and indeed jarred on French taste always, though the Church came to insist on it; but Old Age gave the poet a motive more artistic, foreshadowing Death, and quite sad enough to supply the necessary contrast.  The poet who approached the walls of the chateau and saw, outside, all the unpleasant facts of life conspicuously posted up, as though to shut them out of doors, hastened to ask for entrance, and, when once admitted, found a court of ideals.  Their names matter little.  In the mind of William of Lorris, every one would people his ideal world with whatever ideal figures pleased him, and the only personal value of William’s figures is that they represent what he thought the thirteenth-century ideals of a perfect society.  Here is Courtesy, with a translation long thought to be by Chaucer:-

Apres se tenoit Cortoisie
 Qui moult estoit de tous prisie. 
 Si n’ere orgueilleuse ne fole. 
 C’est cele qui a la karole,
 La soe merci, m’apela,
 Ains que nule, quand je vins la. 
 Et ne fut ne nice n’umbrage,
 Mais sages auques, sans outrage,
 De biaus respons et de biaus dis,
 Onc nus ne fu par li laidis,
 Ne ne porta nului rancune,
 Et fu clere comme la lune
 Est avers les autres estoiles
 Qui ne resemblent que chandoiles. 
 Faitisse estoit et avenant;
 Je ne sai fame plus plaisant. 
 Ele ert en toutes cors bien digne
 D’estre empereris ou roine.

And next that daunced Courtesye,
 That preised was of lowe and hye,
 For neither proude ne foole was she;
 She for to daunce called me,
 I pray God yeve hir right good grace,
 When I come first into the place. 
 She was not nyce ne outrageous,
 But wys and ware and vertuous;
 Of faire speche and of faire answere;
 Was never wight mysseid of her,
 Ne she bar rancour to no wight. 
 Clere browne she was, and thereto bright