Renaissance has not only the sweetness which it derives from the
classical world, but also that curious strength of which there are
great resources in the true middle age. And as I have illustrated
the early strength of the Renaissance by the story of Amis and
Amile, a story which comes from the North, in which a certain
racy Teutonic flavour is perceptible, so I shall illustrate that other
element, its early sweetness, a languid excess of sweetness even,
by another story printed in the same volume of the Bibliotheque
Elzevirienne, and of about the same date, a story which comes,
characteristically, from the South, and connects itself with the
literature of Provence.

The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and
the Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry
for the few, for the elect and peculiar people of the [16] kingdom
of sentiment. But below this intenser poetry there was probably a
wide range of literature, less serious and elevated, reaching, by
lightness of form and comparative homeliness of interest, an
audience which the concentrated passion of those higher lyrics
left untouched. This literature has long since perished, or lives
only in later French or Italian versions. One such version, the
only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he detected
in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of
the latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a unique
manuscript, in the national library of Paris; and there were
reasons which made him divine for it a still more ancient
ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of
some early Arabian Nights.* The little book loses none of its
interest through the criticism which finds in it only a traditional
subject, handed on by one people to another; for after passing