I., ch.

25.
In old France indeed the conditions seem similar to those in England.

The great serio-comic novel of Antoine de la Salle, _Petit Jean de Saintre_, shows us in detail the education and the adventures, which certainly involved a very early introduction to life, of a page in a great house in the fifteenth century.

We must not take everything in this fine comedy too solemnly, but in the fourteenth century _Book of the Knight of the Tour-Landry_ we may be sure that we have at its best the then prevailing view of the relation of a father to his tenderly loved daughters.

Of harshness and rigour in the relationship it is not easy to find traces in this lengthy and elaborate book of paternal counsels.