bow. The arrow called Company completes the victory; the dreaming poet
becomes the Lover ("L'Amant"), and swears allegiance to the God of Love,
who proceeds to instruct him in his laws; and the real action (if it is to
be called such) of the poem begins. This consists in the Lover's desire
to possess himself of the Rosebud, the opposition offered to him by powers
both good and evil, and by Reason in particular, and the support which he
receives from more or less discursive friends. Clearly, the conduct of
such a scheme as this admits of being varied in many ways and protracted
to any length; but its first conception is easy and natural, and when it
was novel to boot, was neither commonplace nor ill-chosen.

After writing about one-fifth of the 22,000 verses of which the original
French poem consists, Guillaume de Lorris, who had executed his part of
the task in full sympathy with the spirit of the chivalry of his times,
died, and left the work to be continued by another trouvere, Jean de Meung
(so-called from the town, near Lorris, in which he lived). "Hobbling
John" took up the thread of his predecessor's poem in the spirit of a wit
and an encyclopaedist. Indeed, the latter appellation suits him in both
its special and its general sense. Beginning with a long dialogue between
Reason and the Lover, he was equally anxious to display his freedom of
criticism and his universality of knowledge, both scientific and
anecdotical. His vein was pre-eminently satirical and abundantly
allusive; and among the chief objects of his satire are the two favourite
themes of medieval satire in general, religious hypocrisy (personified in
"Faux-Semblant," who has been described as one of the ancestors of
"Tartuffe"), and the foibles of women. To the gross salt of Jean de
Meung, even more than to the courtly perfume of Guillaume de Lorris, may
be ascribed the long-lived popularity of the "Roman de la Rose"; and thus
a work, of which already the theme and first conception imply a great step
forwards from the previous range of mediaeval poetry, became a favourite