FRENCH CLASSICS A SELECTION OF TALES BY MODERN WRITERS EDITED With English Notes and a Chronological Table illustrating INTRODUCTION. IN the whole field of French prose literature few portions have been so largely and so successfully cultivated as that over which imagination reigns supreme. There may be, and there will probably ever be, a difference of opinion respecting the 5 merits of French poetry considered with reference to the structure of the lines, the necessity of rhyming, the metre, &c. The talent displayed by novelists, on the other hand, the consummate skill with which they paint manners and analyse the feelings of the human, heart, are facts placed beyond dis- 10 pute. The very horror created in some minds by the bare mention of a French novel serves to prove our assertions. If Voltaire's Candide, for instance, were a dull book, it would no longer be dangerous. French novels, when they are bad, deserve undoubtedly to be treated as the entire library of the Hidalgo Don Quijote was in days of yore, because the authors contrive to be very amusing whilst they are very wicked. But the mistake lies in supposing that all French novels ought, as such, to be condemned to destruction. The present volume will, we hope, show that such is not the case. 15 20 If we go back to the origin of imaginative literature amongst our neighbours, we find two classes of works widely different from each other, but equally popular and interesting. The romances of chivalry, in which the fancy of the Trouvères took such liberties with the lives of Charlemagne, Alexander the 25 Great, King Arthur, and the Twelve Peers of France, appealed to that fondness for the marvellous which has always formed so strong an element in our nature. The fabliaux and tales of Rutebeuf, Gautier de Coinsi, and others, were spirited tableaux de mœurs pourtraying with mingled naïveté and coarseness 3o the manners of mediæval times, denouncing in picturesque b |