—except that, as I learn through an obliging communication from M. Ernest Langlois, it has now been ascertained that he died at Paris in the Rue S. Jacques.
The work of G. de Lorris ends somewhat abruptly at line 4202. It will be seen that it is a simple allegory of the love of a young man for a beautiful girl, and while the poet introduces some charming descriptions of the country in spring-time, redolent of fresh air and sunshine, and gives some forcible characterisations of human passions and vices, he keeps within the plan of a romance, conjoined with instructions in the art of love, drawn from Ovid’s poem “De Arte Amandi,” in accordance with the title of his book.
The question whether the earlier author completed his work or not is left an open one by Mons. E. Langlois, who has fully discussed it in his masterly account of the whole work printed in the second volume of “Histoire de la langue et de la litterature Française,” edited by M. Petit de Julleville. Paris, 1878-1900. He notes that among the two hundred manuscripts of the book that have come down to us, two only give the eighty lines, manifestly spurious, which round off the story, but he hesitates to say that it may not have had an ending which the continuator suppressed.
The work of Jean de Meun or Clopinel is
