widely different from that to which it professes to be a complement. Leaving the idyllic strain, the author takes occasion to introduce a variety of episodes which afford him the opportunity of disburdening his mind of his views on most subjects which occupy the attention of men, while he brings the story to a conclusion, after a fashion which would have amazed his predecessor, could he have foreseen it.
But if he wanders again and again into by paths apart from the main road of the story, it is to these digressions that we owe the lifelike pictures which throw light on his surroundings, in the dramatic episodes of the jealous husband (Chapters XLVIII.-LII.), the duenna’s tale of her own wasted life (Chap. LXXII.), and elsewhere.
Jean de Meun is commonly censured for his depreciation and abuse of women; but may not that censure have been too freely applied from the reading of isolated passages, without taking into account the fact that he is writing dramatically, and is in truth rather representing the views of a jealous and angry husband than expressing deliberately his own? What can be more tenderly pathetic than the picture he draws in Chap. LII. ll. 9901-9948 of a woman’s position before and after marriage?
In the same way, might not the communistic doctrines charged against our author with equal
