greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature. But the
first condition of such aid must be a real, direct, aesthetic charm
in the thing itself. Unless it has that charm, unless some purely
artistic quality went to its original making, no merely antiquarian
effort can ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper
subject of aesthetic criticism. This quality, wherever it exists, it
is always pleasant to define, and discriminate from the sort of
borrowed interest which an old play, or an old story, may very
likely acquire through a true antiquarianism. The story of
Aucassin and Nicolette has something of this quality. Aucassin,
the only son of Count Garins of Beaucaire, is passionately in love
with Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknown parentage, bought of
the Saracens, whom his father will not permit him to marry. The
story turns on the adventures of these two lovers, until at the end
of the piece their mutual fidelity is rewarded. These [20]
adventures are of the simplest sort, adventures which seem to be
chosen for the happy occasion they afford of keeping the eye of
the fancy, perhaps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects, a
garden, a ruined tower, the little hut of flowers which Nicolette
constructs in the forest whither she escapes from her enemies, as
a token to Aucassin that she has passed that way. All the charm
of the piece is in its details, in a turn of peculiar lightness and
grace given to the situations and traits of sentiment, especially in
its quaint fragments of early French prose.

All through it one feels the influence of that faint air of
overwrought delicacy, almost of wantonness, which was so
strong a characteristic of the poetry of the Troubadours. The
Troubadours themselves were often men of great rank; they
wrote for an exclusive audience, people of much leisure and great