VI. HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 5 BOOK knowing English, it is generally admitted that this was Henry III. Former writers knew only her fables, LITERARY till M. la Rue observed the MS. of her lays in the British Museum." Her fables are dedicated to a count William,' who is believed to have been William Longsword, earl of Salisbury, the natural son of Henry II.o That her poems were in high repute in her day, we learn from her contemporary Denys Piramus. 9 She evinces great anxiety for literary reputation; evidently thinks her tales will produce much moral improvement in society; talks of her own merit, and intimates that she had enemies who disturbed her." That her Lais afford much information on the manners of the thirteenth century; that her descriptions are faithful and amusing; that she fixes attention by the choice of her subjects, and by the interest she gives them; that she frequently speaks to the heart by the situations of her heroes, by the catastrophe, and by her power of transferring her own feelings to the reader; and that her diction is simple and 5 See M. Roquefort's remarks on this fact, p. 12, 13; and yet it may be Henry, the son of Henry II. who died 1183. 6 See his Essay on her poems in the Archaeol. v. 13. 7 Pur amur le cunte Willaume.' p. 401. 6 8 Roquef. 20. But M. Meon, in his publication of the curious old work, Le Roman du Renart,' Paris, 1826, has added an ancient piece, called Le Couronnement du Renart,' which is addressed to William count of Flanders, who was killed at a tourney in 1251. He thinks this to have been the person whom Mary calls Le cunte Willaume,' and that this couronnement is her composition. The roman itself contains 30,360 verses. It is a severe satire on the manners of the twelfth century, and acquired so much notice as to be cited by Gautier de Conci, who died in 1236. 9 He thus speaks of them : • Ses lais soleient as dames plaire De joie les oient et de gre, B. Mus. MSS. Domit. A 11. 10 See her prologue to her Lais, 42-46; and the beginning of Guge mar, 48. VII. FABLES OF natural, and tho free and rapid, yet omitting no de- CHAP. tail; and that she may claim the praise of good taste, pleasing thought, and an unaffected sensibility," are LAYS AND the just commendations of her editor, which no one MARIE,&c. who studies her writings will be disposed to diminish. His remarks, that her fables display a distinguished good sense, a sprightly simplicity in the mode of telling them, and a justness in their moral application, and that even Fontaine may have studied them to his own benefit,12 are equally unexceptionable. We have before observed, that her Lais are all Breton stories, and they prove that fairy tales were prevalent in Bretagne. I once thought it unlikely that Bretagne could have had any connexion of *mind with Arabia, or the east, to whom fairies and genii seem most appropriated; but since I have observed that Marbodius, who died 1123, and was bishop of Rennes, in Bretagne, professed to have translated his poem on precious stones from one made by Evax, king of Arabia, and in that poem makes several allusions to the Arabs,13 I cannot but feel, altho this ascription of his work to such a source may have been a fiction, yet that it rather indicates that the Breton mind had, as Mr. Warton thought, some acquaintance with Arabian literature, at least in reputation, and had so much respect for it, that 12 Roquef. Ib. 21. "M. Roquefort's notice, p. 14, 15. 13 This work of Marbodius was in Latin, and has been quoted in this volume before. What Duclos saw, and called the most ancient poem in the old French that was known, (Acad. Inscrip. v. 26. p. 302,) is but a translation of it, the date of which is not certain. Du Than's poems are older. In this translation Marbodius thus mentions Evax : ENGLAND. 15 BOOK it was creditable in Bretagne to refer to it.14 Yet faiVI. ries were not unknown in Wales, and therefore may LITERARY have been from that country naturalized in Bretagne.' HISTORYOF Several of Marie's tales are founded on the agency of supernatural beings, tho of the more agreeable kind, and of Breton origin. There seems to have been in every age, and yet to be in every country, a taste for the supernatural. There are few bosoms which have not some sensibility to its impressions. All have at times mysterious feelings, which it is a labor to suppress. We tend both to believe and to desire something superior to humanity, and thus nature herself has given us that impressibility, to which writers of genius have so often appealed, and seldom appeal entirely in vain. It is pleasing to many to dream of the improbable. That the human mind has sympathies, which cannot be defined, for the unknown, which it is unable to penetrate; and for the invisible, which it is ever desiring to animate and embody, is shewn by the 14 See before, p. 213. 15 M. Roquefort has published with the Lais, a liberal French translation of them, which may be read with pleasure. The lays are fourteen: -Lai de Gugemar, son of Oridial, lord of Leon, in Bretagne; Lai d'Equitan, lord of Nantes; Lai du Fresne, containing the history of a noble lady of Bretagne, an exposed child; Lai de Bisclaveret, a Breton knight; Lai de Lanval, also a Breton knight; Lai des deux Amants; (there is yet, near Rouen, the priory des deux Amants); Lai d'Ywenec, a Breton knight; Lai du Laustic, on the adventures of two knights of Bretagne; Lai de Milon, a similar knight; Lai du Chaitivel, the survivor of four who fought for a lady of Nantz, in Bretagne; Lai du Chevre Feuille, an episode of the romance on Tristan; Lai d'Eleduc; Lai de Graelent; Lai de l'Epine, all on knights of Bretagne. Mr. G. Ellis has given an analysis of them in his Specimens of early Romances: and the observations upon them of the last editor of Warton's History, vol. 1. deserve perusal; tho he mistakes in saying, p. lxxxv, that have produced Alfred's apophthegms as the first specimens of English prose. What I suggested was, that the additions of his own thoughts, which Alfred had inserted in his Boetius, might be considered as the first specimens of moral essays in our country. My opinions on the commencement of English prose, will be seen in a subsequent part of this Work. VII.. FABLES OF amusement which even they who deride the fancies CHAP. of their forefathers, yet find in pourtraying chimerical imaginings of their own. Even these will still LAYS AND regale themselves with creating beings, places and events that have no reality on earth. They find a gratification to themselves in peopling the obscure and unseen with habitants that exist only in their own inventions.16 Imagination, especially in youth, is eager to attempt to frame something better than what we see, and to muse on agencies superior to any that are known to be possessed. It would seem, that man must cease to feel before he ceases to fancy; and that until thought is torpefied by death, he will still continue to do both. This tendency to be interested by supernatural machinery is not wholly unserviceable; it acts as a check on materializing theories. These divest life of all its sublimity, and of hope's sweetest paradise, and turn the man into an instinctive brute. But all fancies of superhuman beings lift up our eyes to something better than ourselves; they lead us to look beyond our material world to some invisible and immaterial agency, which commands and can control it. They suggest possibilities which it is delightful to contemplate; and tho their landscapes be wild, and the agents fantastic, yet they keep the mind from believing that our fleshly structures are the real and only beings of the man. All tales of genii, fairies and apparitions, operate insensibly to create within us a sensation of spiritual existence which no abstract reasoning can produce. It 16 Manfred, Frankenstein, the Monk, St. Leon, Goethe's Faustus, Undina, the Ghost Seer, and a crowd of German productions, are evidences of the secret craving of many, even where no established belief is favored, for something that is not human, but which is superior to man, and capable of inflicting evil upon him, or of imparting to him some superior good. VI. HISTORY OF BOOK is absurd now to fear that the reality of these dreams of fancy should be believed-and therefore their imLITERARY pressions cannot injure. Hence all tales of this sort, which interest without demoralizing, may be classed among those amusive gaieties of the sportive fancy, which increase the intellectual happiness of life; and as our richest pleasures are now derived from the mind, it is policy to multiply and to vary, not to diminish them. Taste may lawfully make these fictions more tasteful, and reason more reasonable in a reasonable age; but neither society nor true philosophy would gain any thing by their merciless and indiscriminate proscription." 17 As those supernatural fictions or effusions of the imagination which prevailed among the nations from whom England has derived portions of its population, and some of which have obtained occasional credence among us, form a part of the history of the mind of the Middle Ages, a few remarks may be permitted on this curious subject. The principle of all supernatural imaginations or beliefs seems to be an indelible and invincible persuasion or supposition, that we are existing amid powers and agencies superior to those of man. Wherever this impression is not united and confined to the real Deity with whom it naturally tends and was intended to link the intellect and the feeling, the perverted and misled fancy will then devise the beings for itself, whom it believes to be about us; and thus acting, it will attach itself to supposititious chimeras of its own adoption or creation. in It is in vain for some to say, that what we cannot hear, or see or feel, cannot really exist; because we all know this assertion to be a delusivė untruth. We cannot see pestilence, as it moves from house to house, tho we behold the bodily frame corrupting under its power-we cannot see thought, altho we hear the sounds to which it forms the human voice -we cannot see the feelings of love, sorrow, gratitude, joy, anger or revenge, altho we can contemplate the pantomimic movements of the limbs or external muscles of the face, which these emotions severally oc casion. We fully perceive, that there are invisible powers and agents nature which put its natural elements into various and often terrible action; and therefore no argument, that what they dread is a nullity be cause unseen, can ever destroy the general persuasion of the reality of supernatural agency, nor prevent the human fancy from indulging and accrediting supernatural imaginations of some sort or other. The Atheist has them as much as others. We perceive the German unbelievers trembling under their fate or destiny, evil eyes or stern necessity; and the French incredules have analogous subjects of secret apprehension. In all, it is the common feeling, attaching itself to different objects. But as every notion on this subject beyond what the Scriptures have revealed, must be the creatures of human invention, so every fancy of this |