And fairly built: at Meun shall he
Be born where Loire flows peacefully.'[2]
I made up my mind to look at the old book again when I should have left the road, and be within reach of a larger library than my own manuscript and a single volume of Defoe.
Jean de Meung.
Jean de Meung, joyous of heart, belongs absolutely to the mediæval revival of learning. He was less of a poet than a scholar, more pleased with a display of knowledge than of beauty, and yet so far undamped by his learning as to be always ready to put plainly out such observations upon life as keep a reader smiling to-day at their shrewdness and applicability. His share of The Romance of the Rose is a strange and suggestive contrast with the beginning that was written by Guillaume de Lorris. The first part, earlier by forty years than the second, and about a fifth of the length, is a delicious allegory on love, with the sweetness and purity of Aucassin and Nicolete; the second opens solidly with a good round speech by Reason, filling something like two thousand lines, and ransacking antiquity to fit her wise saws with ancient instances according to the new fashion of the time.
Taine finds this garrulous Jean 'the most tedious of doctors'; but it is difficult not to throw yourself into his own delight in his new-won knowledge, hard not to enjoy his continual little revelations of character, as when you read:—
'Let one demand of some wise clerk
Well versed in that most noble work
"Of Consolation" foretime writ
By great Boethius, for in it