Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/316

274 merits, for a poem that is sung should not be too expressive. Here is an example:

In Eustache Deschamps we no longer find composer and poet united. Hence his ballads are much more vivid and highly coloured than Machaut’s, therefore often more interesting and yet of an inferior poetical style.

The roundel, because of its very structure, preserved the airy and fluent character of a song to be set to music, even after poets ceased to be composers.

These lines are by Jean Meschinot. The simple and pure talent of Christine de Pisan lends itself admirably to these fugitive effects. She versified with the facility characteristic of the epoch, without much variety of form or thought, in a subdued tone and with a slight touch of melancholy. Her poems remind us of those ivory tablets of the fourteenth century, which always represent the same motifs: a hunting scene, episodes of the Roman de la Rose or of Tristram and