touches of actual life, and words that raise pictures; and lightened all through with a dainty playfulness, as if Ariel himself had hovered near all the time of its writing, and Puck now and again shot a whisper of suggestion.
Yet it is only of late years that the charm of this story has been truly appreciated. Composed probably in Northern France, about the close of the twelfth century,—the time of our own Angevin kings and the most of Old-French literature,—it has survived only in a single manuscript of later date, where found hidden among a number of tales in verse less pleasing in subject and far less delightful in form. There it had lain unknown till discovered by M. de Sainte-Palaye, and printed by him in modernised French in 1752, one hundred and fifty years ago. There is no space here to follow its fortunes since. Even after this revival it was not till more than one hundred years later that it began to attain to any wide recognition. And in England this recognition
