here, and can be discovered with ease and pleasure by any one who wishes
in the drier pages of Dunlop, or in the more flowery and starry pages of
Mr. Symonds' "History of the Renaissance in Italy." The next few pages
will deal only with the French tale-tellers, whose productions before
Margaret's days were, if not very numerous, far from uninteresting, and
whose influence on the slight difference of _genre_ which distinguishes
the tales before us from Italian tales was by no means slight.

In France, as everywhere else, prose fiction, like prose of all kinds,
was considerably later in production than verse, and short tales of the
kind before us were especially postponed by the number, excellence, and
popularity of the verse _fabliaux_. Of these, large numbers have come
down to us, and they exactly correspond in verse to the tales of the
_Decameron_ and the _Heptameron_ in prose, except that the satirical
motive is even more strongly marked, and that touches of romantic
sentiment are rarer. This element of romance, however, appears
abundantly in the long prose versions of the Arthurian and other
legends, and we have a certain number of short prose stories of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, of which the most famous is that
of _Aucassin et Nicolette_. These latter, however, are rather short
romances than distinct prose tales of our kind. Of that kind the first
famous book in French, and the only famous book, besides the one before
us, is the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_. The authorship of this book
is very uncertain. It purports to be a collection of stories told by
different persons of the society of Louis XI., when he was but Dauphin,
and was in exile in Flanders under the protection of the Duke of
Burgundy. But it has of late years been very generally assigned
(though on rather slender grounds of probability, and none of positive
evidence), to Anthony de la Salle, the best French prose writer of
the fifteenth century, except Comines, and one on whom, with an odd