bill by slaying the irreverent giants, Passamont and Alabaster, whose
neighborhood, was unpleasant to the convent. And so on, all about. His
tremendous figure is everywhere, all full of the superbest violence and
of the most wondrous acrobatry. But it is at Roncesvalles that his great
name is greatest. There, where he died, his memory lives in an unfading
halo. In Spain, beneath the Peak of Altabiscar amongst the beech groves,
on the 15th of August, 778, perished the astounding paladin. The _Song
of Roland_ tells how he fell, not quite exactly but very amazingly; the
story is so intensely interesting that the reader is carried away by it
and finds himself for a moment almost able to believe it. It does not
matter that the defeat is attributed to the Saracens, not one of whom
was present, (the whole thing having been got up and carried out by the
Basques alone;) that error was indispensable to the tale, and gives it
much of its strange charm."

There is an excellent reason why the poem might fail in sharp historical
accuracy; it was not formally composed until between three and four
hundred years after the battle. The event itself happened in 778; the
first known MS. was made, by a scribe, about 1150. All during the long
interval, ballad-singers and minstrels had been extolling France and
Roland; the love of the heroic was as strong as before Homer; the hero's
name had grown: with his fame into titanic proportions; the actual
author, (conjectured to have been one Turoldus or Theurolde, a monk,)
had but to take the poetic material ready at his hand and fashion it
into the epic. Time had dimmed and enlarged the details; the _Song of
Roland_ deals in mass and massive heroes; in this it is like a book from
the Iliad.

It is not a long poem; there are only about 3,500 lines in all, but the
Old French in which it is written makes it difficult reading, at least