The French Humorists from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III. THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE. Be it right or wrong, these men among On women do complain; Affirming this, how that it ia A labor spent in vain To love them well; lor never a dele They love a man again. The Nut-Brown Maid. 7E have to treat of a book which for two hundred and fifty years continued to...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III. THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE. Be it right or wrong, these men among On women do complain; Affirming this, how that it ia A labor spent in vain To love them well; lor never a dele They love a man again. The Nut-Brown Maid. 7E have to treat of a book which for two hundred and fifty years continued to live as a sort of Bible in France; the source whence its readers drew their maxims of morality, their philosophy, their science, their history, and even their religion; and which, after having retained its popularity for a length of time almost unparalleled in the history of literature, was revived with success after the Renaissance, the only mediaeval book which for a long space of years enjoyed this distinction in France. I shall endeavor to show some of the reasons of this long-continued success, and to prove that the book, once the companion of knights and dames, of damoiseaux and damoiselles, has the strongest claims on the student of the Middle Ages; that it is not a congeries of dry and dead bones of antiquity, not a mass of mediaeval fables, but a book full of ideas, information, and suggestion? a book warm with life. English readers know the Romance of the Rose through the translation which is attributed to Chaucer. Whether it be really his or not is a matter which doesREASONS OF SUCCESS. 45 not concern us here, and to save trouble in explanation, I -will refer to it as Chaucer's translation. It is unfortunate, in some respects, that it contains only a portion ? viz., the first 5,170 lines, and then, with an omission of 5,544 lines, about 1,300 more. It gives entire the portion contributed by Guillaume de Lorris, and as much of the remainder as fell in most readily with the humor of the translator, the attack on the hypocrisy of mo...