Transcribed from the 1910 David Nutt edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

   Dedicated to the Hon. James Russell Lowell.

   There is nothing in artistic poetry quite akin to “Aucassin and Nicolete.”

   By a rare piece of good fortune the one manuscript of the Song-Story has escaped those waves of time, which have wrecked the bark of Menander, and left of Sappho but a few floating fragments. The very form of the tale is peculiar; we have nothing else from the twelfth or thirteenth century in the alternate prose and verse of the

    cante-fable

   .

    {1}

   We have fabliaux in verse, and prose Arthurian romances. We have

    Chansons de Geste

   , heroic poems like “Roland,” unrhymed assonant

    laisses

   , but we have not the alternations of prose with

    laisses

   in seven-syllabled lines. It cannot be certainly known whether the form of “Aucassin and Nicolete” was a familiar form—used by many

    jogleors

   , or wandering minstrels and story-tellers such as Nicolete, in the tale, feigned herself to be,—or whether this is a solitary experiment by “the old captive” its author, a contemporary, as M. Gaston Paris thinks him, of Louis VII (1130). He was original enough to have invented, or adopted from popular tradition, a form for himself; his originality declares itself everywhere in his one surviving masterpiece. True, he uses certain traditional formulae, that have survived in his time, as they survived in Homer’s, from the manner of purely popular poetry, of

    Volkslieder

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