points of view, in the days of Chaucer's youth, there was no rival to the
"Roman de la Rose," one of those rare works on which the literary history
of whole generations and centuries may be said to hinge. The Middle Ages,
in which from various causes the literary intercommunication between the
nations of Europe was in some respects far livelier than it has been in
later times, witnessed the appearance of several such works--diverse in
kind but similar to one another in the universality of their popularity:
"The Consolation of Philosophy," the "Divine Comedy," the "Imitation of
Christ," the "Roman de la Rose," the "Ship of Fools." The favour enjoyed
by the "Roman de la Rose," was in some ways the most extraordinary of all.
In France, this work remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and
"the source whence every rhymer drew for his needs" down to the period of
the classical revival led by Ronsard (when it was edited by Clement Marot,
Spenser's early model). In England, it exercised an influence only
inferior to that which belonged to it at home upon both the matter and the
form of poetry down to the renascence begun by Surrey and Wyatt. This
extraordinary literary influence admits of a double explanation. But just
as the authorship of the poem was very unequally divided between two
personages, wholly divergent in their purposes as writers, so the
POPULARITY of the poem is probably in the main to be attributed to the
second and later of the pair.

To the trouvere Guillaume de Lorris (who took his name from a small town
in the valley of the Loire) was due the original conception of the "Roman
de la Rose," for which it is needless to suspect any extraneous source.
To novelty of subject he added great ingenuity of treatment. Instead of
narrative of warlike adventures he offered to his readers a psychological
romance, in which a combination of symbolisations and personified
abstractions supplied the characters of the moral conflict represented.
Bestiaries and Lapidaries had familiarised men's minds with the art of