The Project Gutenberg eBook, Aucassin and Nicolete, by Andrew Lang
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Title: Aucassin and Nicolete
Author: Andrew Lang
Release Date: March 17, 2005 [eBook #1578]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE***
Transcribed from the 1910 David Nutt edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE
Dedicated to the Hon. James Russell Lowell.
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 seven-syllabled
lines.
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