INTRODUCTION
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 sevensyllabled
lines.