The Lays of Ancient Rome Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Lays of Ancient Rome A lay is a brief poem usually narrating some deed of daring, the exploit of one man, or the achievement of a whole nation. The word is the same as the old French lai and seems originally to have meant a song, in the period of the Middle Ages when almost all poetry was sung, or chanted, to the accompaniment of some musical instrument. We, who read these tales in print to-day, miss the splendor that attended them in olden times when there were in existence only a few books, all laboriously copied by hand, and when it was the custom for people to gather in some spacious hall, or some open street, to hear the minstrel recite his heroic stories with the utmost dramatic effectiveness of voice and gesture. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.