Page:Romances of Chivalry on Greek Soil.djvu/18

Rh, and he who denies its claims is —rustic or provincial.

The Erotokratia of this poem cannot fail to remind us of the close, surrounded by castled walls, in the Romance of the Rose. It, too, is a dream-castle, peopled with allegorical figures; the dreamer, like Lybistros, is a scorner of Love, and like him makes complete submission to the god. This mansion, in which Love dwelled, was not an invention of the thirteenth-century poet William de Lorris. He owed it, as M. Langlois has shown, to older poems in which a garden and palace of Love were described, especially the fableau of Dieu d'amours and the Altercation of Phyllis and Flora; and in the Dieu d'amours, as in Lybistros and the Romance of the Rose, the divine place is seen in a dream. These works establish that the idea of a beautiful dwelling of Love appeared in French literature in the twelfth century: But we may safely say that this idea did not travel from the West to the East. The courts to which Belthandros wandered, and of which Lybistros dreamed, have no features which a Greek poet need have looked abroad