service which were soon to become the cult of European society.
The Countess Marie, possessing her royal mother's tastes and
gifts, made of her court a social experiment station, where these
Provencal ideals of a perfect society were planted afresh in
congenial soil. It appears from contemporary testimony that the
authority of this celebrated feudal dame was weighty, and widely
felt. The old city of Troyes, where she held her court, must be
set down large in any map of literary history. For it was there
that Chretien was led to write four romances which together form
the most complete expression we possess from a single author of
the ideals of French chivalry. These romances, written in
eight-syllable rhyming couplets, treat respectively of Erec and
Enide, Cliges, Yvain, and Lancelot. Another poem, "Perceval le
Gallois", was composed about 1175 for Philip, Count of Flanders,
to whom Chretien was attached during his last years. This last
poem is not included in the present translation because of its
extraordinary length of 32,000 verses, because Chretien wrote
only the first 9000 verses, and because Miss Jessie L. Weston has
given us an English version of Wolfram's wellknown "Parzival",
which tells substantially the same story, though in a different
spirit. To have included this poem, of which he wrote less than
one-third, in the works of Chretien would have been unjust to
him. It is true the romance of "Lancelot" was not completed by
Chretien, we are told, but the poem is his in such large part
that one would be over-scrupulous not to call it his. The other
three poems mentioned are his entire. In addition, there are
quite generally assigned to the poet two insignificant lyrics,
the pious romance of "Guillaume d'Angleterre", and the
elaboration of an episode from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (vi., 426-
674) called "Philomena" by its recent editor (C. de Boer, Paris,