Page:The Golden verses of Pythagoras (IA cu31924026681076).pdf/90

 England and Germany were inundated with a mass of romances and ballads, wherein were pictured the knights of the court of Charlemagne and those of the Round Table. All these works were written in verse, and the greater part, particularly those composed by the troubadours or their disciples, intended to be sung, were cut into strophes. Those of the imitator poets, who had had the force to go back to the allegorical sense of their model, had only developed and enriched it with their own knowledge; the others, following their various methods of considering it, had chosen subjects real and historical, or indeed had followed ingenuously without aim or plan, the impulse of their vagabond imagination. In France could be seen represented by the side of the stories of Tristan, of Lancelot, of the Grail, and of Ogier-le-Danois, that of Alexander the Great and of the Bible, that of the Seven Sages and of Judas Maccabeus, that of the History of the Normands and the Bretons, and finally that of the Rose, the most famous of all. A certain Guilhaume had published a philosophical romance upon the nature of beasts.

Already the Italian poets, after having received from the troubadours the form of their verses and that of their works, had surpassed their masters and had caused them to be forgotten. Petrarch in the sonnet and Dante in the sirvente assumed all the glory of their models, and left not any for the successors ; already even Bojardo and some*