But the most singular peculiarity of Romance-land remains to be noticed—there are no people in it, that is, no common people. The lowest rank in life is that of a dwarf. It is true that if a knight loses his way there will always be a clown or two to set him right. But they disappear at once, and seem to be wholly phantasmagoric, or, at best, an expedient rendered necessary by the absence of guide-posts, and the inability of the cavaliers to read them if there had been any. There are plenty of Saracens no doubt, but they are more like cucumbers than men, and are introduced merely that the knight may have the pleasure of slicing them.

We cannot claim any condensed poetical merit for the Metrical Romances. They have very few quotable passages and fewer vigorous single lines. Their merit consists in a diffuse picturesqueness, and reading them is like turning over illuminated missals in a traveler’s half-hour, which leave a vague impression on the mind of something vivid and fanciful, without one’s being able to recall any particular beauty. Some of them have great narrative merit, being straightforward and to the purpose, never entangling themselves in reflection or subordinating the story to the expression. In this respect they are refreshing after reading many poems of the modern school, which, under the pretense of sensuousness, are truly sensual, and deal quite as much with the upholstery as with the soul of poetry. The thought has nowadays become of less importance than the vehicle of it, and amid the pomp of words we are too often reminded of an Egyptian procession, in which all the painful musical instruments then invented, priests, soldiers, and royalty itself, accompany the triumphal chariot containing perhaps, after all, only an embalmed monkey or a pickled ibis.

There is none of this nonsense in the Old Romances, though sometimes they are tediously sentimental, and we wonder as much at the capacity of our ancestors in bearing dry verses as dry blows. Generally, however, they show an unaffected piety and love of nature. The delight of the old minstrels in the return of Spring is particularly agreeable, and another argument in favor of the Northern origin of this class of poems. Many of them open with passages like this:

Merry it is in the month of May,

When the small fowls sing their lay,

Then flowers the apple-tree and perry,

And the little birds sing merry;

Then the ladies strew their bowers

With red roses and lily flowers,

The damisels lead down the dance,