[Sidenote: Yet form and spirit both original.]

In that earliest, really national, and vernacular school, however, which has been the chief subject of discourse, the direction was mainly and almost wholly towards lyric; and the supremacy of the sonnet and the canzone is the less surprising because their rivals were for the most part less accomplished examples of the same kind. The Contrasto[191] of Ciullo itself is a poem in lyric stanzas of five lines—three of sixteen syllables, rhymed a, and two hendecasyllabics, rhymed b. The rhymes are fairly exact, though sometimes loose, o and u, e and i, being permitted to pair. The poem, a simple discourse or dispute between two lovers, something in the style of some French pastourelles, displays however, with some of the exaggeration and stock phrase of Provencal (perhaps we might say of all) love-poetry, little or nothing of that peculiar mystical tone which we have been accustomed to associate with early Italian verse, chiefly represented, as it is to most readers, by the Vita Nuova, where the spirit is slightly altered in itself, and speaks in the mouth of a poet greater in his weakest moments than the whole generation from Ciullo to Guittone in their strongest. This spirit, showing itself in the finer and more masculine form in Dante himself, in the more feminine and weaker in Petrarch, not merely gives us sublime or exquisite poetry in the fourteenth century, but in the sixteenth contributes very largely to launch, on fresh careers of achievement, the whole poetry of France and of England. But it is fair to acknowledge its presence in Dante's predecessors, and at the same time to confess that they themselves do not seem to have learned it from any one, or at least from any single master or group of masters. The Provencal poets deify passion, and concentrate themselves wholly upon it; but it is seldom, indeed, that we find the "metaphysical" touch in the Provencals proper. And it is this—this blending of love and religion, of scholasticism and minnedienst (to borrow a word wanted in other languages than that in which it exists)—that is attributed by the partisans of the East to Arabian influence, or at least to Arabian contact. Some stress has been laid on the testimony of Ibn Zobeir about the end of the twelfth century, and consequently not long before even the latest date assigned to Ciullo, that Alcamo itself was entirely Mussulman in belief.

[Footnote 191: The text with comment, stanza by stanza, is to be found in the book cited above.]

[Sidenote: Love-lyric in different European countries.]

On these points it is not possible to decide: the point on which to lay the finger for our present purpose is that the contribution of Italy at this time was, on the one hand, the further refinement of the Provencal attention to form, and the production of one capital instrument of European poetry—the sonnet; on the other, the conveyance, by means of this instrument and others, of a further, and in one way almost final, variation of the poetic expression of love. It is of the first importance to note the characteristics, in different nations at nearly the same time, of this rise of lyrical love-poetry. We find it in Northern and Southern France, probably at about the same time; in Germany and Italy somewhat later, and almost certainly in a state of pupilship to the French. All, in different ways, display a curious and delightful metrical variety, as if the poet were trying to express the eternal novelty, combined with the eternal oneness, of passion by variations of metrical form. In each language these variations reflect national peculiarities—in Northern French and German irregular bursts with a multiplicity of inarticulate refrain, in Provencal and Italian a statelier and more graceful but somewhat more monotonous arrangement and proportion.

And the differences of spirit are equally noticeable, though one must, as always, be careful against generalising too rashly as to their identity with supposed national characteristics. The innumerable love-poems of the trouveres, pathetic sometimes, and sometimes impassioned, are yet, as a rule, cheerful, not very deep, verging not seldom on pure comedy. The so-called monotonous enthusiasm of the troubadour, his stock-images, his musical form, sublime to a certain extent the sensual side of love, but confine themselves to that side merely, as a rule, or leave it only to indulge in the purely fantastic.

Of those who borrowed from them, the Germans, as we should expect, lean rather to the Northern type, but vary it with touches of purity, and other touches of religion; the Italians to the Southern, exalting it into a mysticism which can hardly be called devotional, though it at times wears the garb of devotion.[192] Among those collections for which the student of letters pines, not the least desirable would be a corpus of the lyric poets of Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We should then see—after a fashion difficult if not impossible in the sporadic study of texts edited piecemeal, and often overlaid with comment not of the purely literary kind—at once the general similarity and the local or individual exceptions, the filiation of form, the diffusion of spirit. No division of literature, perhaps, would serve better as a kind of chrestomathy for illustrating the positions on which the scheme of this series is based. And though it is overshadowed by the achievements of its own pupils; though it has a double portion of the mediaeval defect of "school"-work—of the almost tedious similarity of different men's manner—the Italian poetry, which is practically the Italian literature, of the thirteenth century would be not the least interesting part of such a corpus.

[Footnote 192: "Sacro erotismo," "baccanale cristiano," are phrases of Professor d'Andrea's.]

[Sidenote: Position of Spanish.]

The Spanish literature[193] with which we have to do is probably inferior in bulk even to that of Italy; it is certainly far less rich in named and more or less known authors, while it is a mere drop as compared with the Dead Sea of Byzantine writing. But by virtue of at least one really great composition, the famous Poema del Cid, it ranks higher than either of these groups in sheer literary estimation, while from the point of view of literary history it is perhaps more interesting than the Italian, and certainly far more interesting than the Greek. It does not rank with French as an instance of real literary preponderance and chieftainship; or with German as an example of the sudden if short blossoming of a particular period and dialect into great if not wholly original literary prominence; much less with Icelandic and Provencal, as containing a "smooth and round" expression of certain definite characteristics of literature and life once for all embodied. It has to give way not merely to Provencal, but to Italian itself as an example of early scholarship in literary form. But it makes a most interesting pair to English as an instance of vigorous and genuine national literary development; while, if it is inferior to English, as showing that fatal departmental or provincial separation, that "particularism" which has in many ways been so disastrous to the Peninsula, it once more, by virtue of the Poema, far excels our own production of the period in positive achievement, and foretells the masterpieces of the national poetry in a way very different from any that can be said to be shown in Layamon or the Ancren Riwle, even in the Arthurian romances and the early lyrics.

[Footnote 193: Spanish can scarcely be said to have shared, to an extent commensurate with its interest, in the benefit of recent study of the older forms of modern languages. There is, at any rate in English, and I think elsewhere, still nothing better than Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature (3 vols., London, 1849, and reprinted since), in the early part of which he had the invaluable assistance of the late Don Pascual de Gayangos. Some scattered papers may be found in Romania. Fortunately, almost all the known literary materials for our period are to be found in Sanchez' Poesias Castellanas Anteriores al Siglo XV., the Paris (1842) reprint of which by Ochoa, with a few valuable additions, I have used. The Poema del Cid is, except in this old edition, rather discreditably inaccessible—Vollmoeller's German edition (Halle, 1879), the only modern or critical one, being, I understand, out of print. It would be a good deed if the Clarendon Press would furnish students with this, the only rival of Beowulf and the Chanson de Roland in the combination of antiquity and interest.]

[Sidenote: Catalan-Provencal.]

The earliest literature which, in the wide sense, can be called Spanish divides itself into three heads—Provencal-Catalan; Galician-Portuguese; and Castilian or Spanish proper. Not merely Catalonia itself, but Aragon, Navarre, and even Valencia, were linguistically for centuries mere outlying provinces of the langue d'oc. The political circumstances which attended the dying-out of the Provencal school at home, for a time even encouraged the continuance of Provencal literature in Spain: and to a certain extent Spanish and Provencal appear to have been written, if not spoken, bilingually by the same authors. But for the general purpose of this book the fact of the persistence of the "Limousin" tongue in Catalonia and (strongly dialected) in Valencia having been once noted, not much further notice need be taken of this division.

[Sidenote: Galician-Portuguese.]

So also we may, with a brief distinctive notice, pass by the Galician dialects which found their perfected literary form later in Portuguese. No important early literature remains in Galician, and of Portuguese itself there does not seem to be anything certainly dating before the fourteenth century, or anything even probably attributed to an earlier time except a certain number of ballads, as to the real antiquity of which a sane literary criticism has always to reiterate the deepest and most irremovable doubts. The fact of the existence of this dialect, and of its development later into the language of Camoens, is of high interest: the positive documents which at this time it offers for comment are very scanty indeed.

[Sidenote: Castilian.]

With Castilian—that is to say, Spanish proper—the case is very different. It cannot claim any great antiquity: and as is the case with Italian, and to a less degree with French also, the processes by which it came into existence out of Latin are hid from us to a degree surprising, even when we remember the political and social welter in which Europe lay between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. It is, of course, a most natural and constant consideration that the formation of literary languages was delayed in the Romance-speaking countries by the fact that everybody of any education at all had Latin ready to his hands. And the exceptional circumstances of Spain, which, after hardly settling down under the Visigothic conquest, was whelmed afresh by the Moorish invasion, have not been excessively insisted upon by the authorities who have dealt with the subject. But still it cannot but strike us as peculiar that the document—the famous Charter of Aviles,[194] which plays in the history of Spanish something like the same part which the Eulalia hymn and the Strasburg Oaths play in French—dates only from the middle of the twelfth century, more than three hundred years after the Strasburg interchange, and at a time when French was not merely a regularly constituted language, but already had no inconsiderable literature. It is true that the Aviles document is not quite so jargonish as the Strasburg, but the same mark—the presence of undigested Latin—appears in both.

[Footnote 194: Extracts of this appear in Ticknor, Appendix A., iii. 352, note.]

It is, however, fair to remember that prose is almost invariably later than poetry, and that official prose of all periods has a tendency to the barbarous. If the Aviles charter be genuine, and of its assigned date, it does not follow that at the very same time poetry of a much less uncouth character was not being composed in Spanish. And as a matter of fact we have, independently of the ballads, the great Poema del Cid, which has sometimes been supposed to be of antiquity equal to this, and which can hardly be more than some fifty years later.

[Sidenote: Ballads?]

As to the ballads, what has been said about those in Portuguese must be repeated at somewhat greater length. There is no doubt at all that these ballads (which are well known even to English readers by the masterly paraphrases of Lockhart) are among the finest of their kind. They rank with, and perhaps above, the best of the Scottish poems of the same class. But we have practically, it would seem, no earlier authority for them than the great Cancioneros of the sixteenth century. It is, of course, said that the Cronica General (see post), which is three centuries earlier, was in part compiled from these ballads. But, in the first place, we do not know that this was the fact, or that the ballads were not compiled from the Chronicles, or from traditions which the Chronicles embodied. And in the second place, if the Chronicles were compiled from ballads, we do not know that these ballads, as pieces of finished literature and apart from their subjects, were anything at all like the ballads that we possess. This last consideration—an uncomfortable one, but one which the critic is bound to urge—at once disposes of, or reduces to a minimum, the value of the much-vaunted testimony of a Latin poem, said to date before the middle of the eleventh century, that "Roderic, called Mio Cid," was sung about. No doubt he was; and no doubt, as the expression Mio Cid is not a translation from the Arabic, but a quite evidently genuine vernacularity, he was sung of in those terms. But the testimony leaves us as much in doubt as ever about the age of the existing Cid ballads. And if this be the case about the Cid ballads, the subject of which did not die till hard upon the opening of the twelfth century itself, or about those concerning the Infantes of Lara, how much more must it be so with those that deal with such subjects as Bernardo del Carpio and the Charlemagne invasion, three hundred years earlier, when it is tolerably certain that there was nothing at all resembling what we now call Spanish? It seems sometimes to be thought that the antiquity of the subject of a ballad comports in some strange fashion the antiquity of the ballad itself; than which nothing can be much more disputable. Indeed the very metre of the ballads themselves—which, though simple, is by no means of a very primitive character, and represents the "rubbing down" of popular dialect and unscholarly prosody for a long time against the regular structure of Latin—disproves the extreme earliness of the poems in anything like their present form. The comparatively uncouth, though not lawless metres of early Teutonic poetry are in themselves warrants of their antiquity: the regularity, not strait-laced but unmistakable, of the Spanish ballads is at least a strong suggestion that they are not very early.

[Sidenote: The Poema del Cid.]

At any rate there is no sort of proof that they are early; and in this history it has been made a rule to demand proof, or at least the very strongest probability. If there be any force in the argument at the end of the last paragraph, it tells (unless, indeed, the latest critical hypothesis be adopted, of which more presently) as much in favour of the antiquity of the Poema del Cid as it tells against that of the ballads. This piece, which has come down to us in a mutilated condition, though it does not seem likely that its present length (3744 lines) has been very greatly affected by the mutilations, has been regarded as dating not earlier than the middle of the twelfth or later than the middle of the thirteenth century—that is to say, in the first case, within a lifetime of the events it professes to deal with; in the second, at scarcely more than two lifetimes from them. The historical personality of Ruy Diaz de Bivar, el Cid Campeador (?1040-1099), does not concern us, though it is perfectly well established in general by the testimony of his enemies, as well as by that of his countrymen, and is indeed almost unique in history as that of a national hero at once of history and of romance. The Roderic who regained what a Roderic had lost may have been—must have been, indeed—presented with many facts and achievements which he never performed, and there may be no small admixture of these in the Poema itself; but that does not matter at all to literature. It would not, strictly speaking, matter to literature if he had never existed. But not every one can live up to this severe standard in things literary; and it is undoubtedly a comfort to the natural man to know that the Cid certainly did exist, and that, to all but certainty, his blood runs in the veins of the Queen of England and of the Emperor of Austria, not to mention the King of Spain, to-day.

[Sidenote: A Spanish chanson de geste.]

But in the criticism of his poetical history this is in strictness irrelevant. It is unlucky for that criticism that Southey and Ticknor—the two best critics, not merely in English but in any language, who have dealt with Spanish literature—were quite unacquainted with the French chansons de geste; while of late, discussion of the Poema, as of other early Spanish literature, has been chiefly abandoned to philologists. No one familiar with these chansons (the greatest and oldest of which, the Chanson de Roland, was to all but a certainty in existence when Ruy Diaz was in his cradle, and a hundred years before the Poema was written) can fail to see in a moment that this latter is itself a chanson de geste. It was written much nearer to the facts than any one of its French analogues, except those of the Crusading cycle, and it therefore had at least the chance of sticking much closer to those facts. Nor is there much doubt that it does. We may give up as many as we please of its details; we may even, if, not pleasing, we choose to obey the historians, give up that famous and delightful episode of the Counts of Carrion, which indeed is not so much an episode as the main subject of the greater part of the poem. But—partly because of its nearness to the subject, partly because of the more intense national belief in the hero, most of all, perhaps, because the countrymen of Cervantes already possessed that faculty of individual, not merely of typical, characterisation which has been, as a rule, denied to the countrymen of Corneille—the poem is far more alive than the not less heroic histories of Roncesvaux or of Aliscans. Even in the Nibelungenlied, to which it has been so often compared, the men (not the women—there the Teutonic genius bears its usual bell) are, with the exception, perhaps, of Hagen, shadowy, compared not merely to Rodrigo himself, but to Bermuez and Muno Gustioz, to Asur Gonzalez and Minaya.

[Sidenote: In scheme and spirit.]

Still the chanson stamp is unmistakably on it from the very beginning, where the Cid, like three-fourths of the chanson heroes themselves, has experienced royal ingratitude, through the vaunts and the fighting, and the stock phrases (abaxan las lanzas following abrazan los escudos, and the like), to that second marriage connecting the Cid afresh with royalty, which is almost as common in the chansons as the initial ingratitude. It would be altogether astonishing if the chansons had not made their way, when French literature was making it everywhere, into the country nearest to France. In face of the Poema del Cid, it is quite certain that they had done so, and that here as elsewhere French literature performed its vigorous, and in a way self-sacrificing, function of teaching other nations to do better than their teacher.

[Sidenote: Difficulties of its prosody.]

When we pass from comparisons of general scheme and spirit to those of metrical form, the matter presents greater puzzles. As observed above, the earliest French chansons known to us are written in a strict syllabic metre, with a regular caesura, and arranged in distinct though not uniformly long laisses, each tipped with an identical assonance. Further, it so happens that this very assonance is one of the best known characteristics of Spanish poetry, which is the only body of verse except old French to show it in any great volume or variety. The Spanish ballads are uniformly written in trochaic octosyllables (capable of reduction or extension to six, seven, or nine), regularly assonanced in the second and fourth line, but not necessarily showing either rhyme or assonance in the first and third. This measure became so popular that the great dramatists adopted it, and as it thus figures in the two most excellent productions of the literature, ballad and drama, it has become practically identified in the general mind with Spanish poetry, and not so very long ago might have been described by persons, not exactly ignorant, as peculiar to it.

[Sidenote: Ballad-metre theory.]

But when we turn to the Poema del Cid we find nothing like this. It is true that its latest and most learned student, Professor Cornu of Prague,[195] has, I believe, persuaded himself that he has discovered the basis of its metre to be the ballad octosyllables, full or catalectic, arranged as hemistichs of a longer line, and that he has been able to point out some hundreds of tolerably perfect verses of the kind. But this hypothesis necessitates our granting that it was possible for the copyists, or the line of copyists, of the unique MS. in the vast majority of cases to mistake a measure so simple, so universally natural, and, as history shows, so peculiarly grateful to the Spanish ear, and to change it into something quite different.

[Footnote 195: I have not seen Professor Cornu's paper itself, but only a notice of it by M. G. Paris in Romania, xxii. 153, and some additional annotations by the Professor himself at p. 531 of the same volume.]

[Sidenote: Irregularity of line.]

For there is no question but that at first sight, and not at first sight only, the Poema del Cid seems to be the most irregular production of its kind that can claim high rank in the poetry of Europe. It is not merely that it is "rough," as its great northern congener the Nibelungenlied is usually said to be, or that its lines vary in length from ten syllables to over twenty, as some lines of Anglo-Saxon verse do. It is that there is nothing like the regular cadence of the one, or (at least as yet discovered) the combined system of accent and alliteration which accounts for the other. Almost the only single feature which is invariable is the break in the middle of the line, which is much more than a mere caesura, and coincides not merely with the end of a word, but with a distinct stop or at least pause in sense. Beyond this, except by the rather violent hypothesis of copyist misdeeds above referred to,[196] nobody has been able to get further in a generalisation of the metre than that the normal form is an eight and six (better a seven and seven) "fourteener," trochaically cadenced, but admitting contraction and extension with a liberality elsewhere unparalleled.

[Footnote 196: It is perhaps fair to Professor Cornu to admit some weight in his argument that where proper names predominate—i.e., where the copyist was least likely to alter—his basis suggests itself most easily.]

And the ends of the verses are as troublesome as their bodies. Not only is there no absolute system either of assonance or of rhyme; not only does the consideration that at a certain stage assonance and consonance[197] meet and blend help us little; but it is almost or quite impossible to discern any one system on which the one or the other, or both, can be thought to have been used. Sometimes, indeed frequently, something like the French laisses or continuous blocks of end-sound appear: sometimes the eye feels inclined to see quatrains—a form, as we shall see, agreeable to early Spain, and very common in all European nations at this stage of their development. But it is very seldom that either is clearly demonstrable except in parts, while neither maintains itself for long. Generally the pages present the spectacle of an intensely irregular mosaic, or rather conglomerate, of small blocks of assonance or consonance put together on no discoverable system whatever. It is, of course, fair to remember that Anglo-Saxon verse—now, according to the orthodox, to be ranked among the strictest prosodic kinds—was long thought to be as formless as this. But after the thorough ransacking and overhauling which almost all mediaeval literature has had during the last century, it is certainly strange that the underlying system in the Spanish case, if it exists, should not have been discovered, or should have been discovered only by such an Alexandrine cutting of the knot as the supposition that the copyist has made "pie" of about seventy per cent at least of the whole.

[Footnote 197: Some writers very inconveniently, and by a false transference from "consonant," use "consonance" as if equivalent to "alliteration." It is much better kept for full rhyme, in which vowels and consonants both "sound with" each other.]

Still the form, puzzling as it is, is extremely interesting, and very satisfactory to those who can be content with unsystematic enjoyment. The recurrent wave-sound which has been noted in the chansons is at least as noticeable, though less regular, here. Let us, for instance, open the poem in the double-columned edition of 1842 at random, and take the passage on the opening, pp. 66, 67, giving the best part of two hundred lines, from 3491 to 3641. The eye is first struck with the constant repetition of catch-endings—"Infantes de Carrion," "los del Campeador"—each of which occurs at a line-end some dozen times in the two pages. The second and still more striking thing is that almost all this long stretch of verse, though not in one single laisse, is carried upon an assonance in o, either plump (Infanzon, cort, Carrion, &c.), which continues with a break or two for at least fifty lines, or with another vowel in double assonance (taiadores, tendones, varones). But this sequence is broken incomprehensibly by such end-words as tomar; and the length of the lines defies all classification, though one suspects some confusion of arrangement. For instance, it is not clear why

"Colada e Tizon que non lidiasen con ellas los del Campeador"

should be printed as one line, and

"Hybalos ver el Rey Alfonso. Dixieron los del Campeador,"

as two.

If we then turn to the earlier part, that which comes before the Carrion story, we shall find the irregularity greater still. It is possible, no doubt, by making rules sufficiently elastic, to devise some sort of a system for five consecutive lines which end folgar, comer, acordar, grandes, and pan; but it will be a system so exceedingly elastic that it seems a superfluity of trouble to make it. On a general survey it may, I think, be said that either in double or single assonance a and o play a much larger part than the other vowels, whereas in the French analogues there is no predominance of this kind, or at least nothing like so much. And lastly, to conclude[198] these rather desultory remarks on a subject which deserves much more attention than it has yet had, it may be worth observing that by an odd coincidence the Poema del Cid concludes with a delusive personal mention very similar to, though even more precise than, that about "Turoldus" in the Chanson de Roland. For it ends—

"Per Abbat le escribio en el mes de maio En era de mill e CC ... XLV. anos,"

there being, perhaps, something dropped between the second C and the X. Peter Abbat, however, has been less fortunate than Turoldus, in that no one, it seems, has asserted his authorship, though he may have been the copyist-malefactor of theory. And it may perhaps be added that if MCCXLV. is the correct date, this would correspond to 1207 of our chronology, the Spanish mediaeval era starting thirty-eight years too early.

[Footnote 198: I have not thought it necessary to give an abstract of the contents of the poem, because Southey's Chronicle of the Cid is accessible to everybody, and because no wise man will ever attempt to do over again what Southey has once done.]

[Sidenote: Other poems.]

The remaining literature before the end of the thirteenth century (immediately after that date there is a good deal, but most of it is imitated from France) may be dismissed more briefly. It is not very bulky, but it is noteworthy that it is collected in a manner by no means usual at the time, under two known names, those of Gonzalo Berceo, priest of St Elianus at Callahorra, and of King Alfonso X. For the Spanish Alexander of Juan Lorenzo Segura, though written before 1300, is clearly but one of the numerous family of the French and French-Latin Alexandreids and Romans d'Alixandre. And certain poems on Apollonius of Tyre, St Mary of Egypt, and the Three Kings, while their date is rather uncertain, are also evidently "school poems" of the same kind.

[Sidenote: Apollonius and Mary of Egypt.]

The Spanish Apollonius,[199] however, is noteworthy, because it is written in a form which is also used by Berceo, and which has sometimes been thought to be spoken of in the poem itself as nueva maestria. This measure is the old fourteener, which struggles to appear in the Cid, regularly divided into hephthemimers, and now regularly arranged also in mono-rhymed quatrains. The "Life of St Mary of Egypt,"[200] on the other hand, is in octosyllabic couplets, treated with the same freedom that we find in contemporary German handlings of that metre, and varying from five syllables to at least eleven. The rhymes are good, with very rare lapses into assonance; one might suspect a pretty close adherence to a probably Provencal original, and perhaps not a very early date. Ticknor, whose Protestantism or whose prudery seems to have been shocked by this "coarse and indecent history"—he might surely have found politer language for a variant of the Magdalene story, which is beautiful in itself and has received especial ornament from art—thought it composed of "meagre monkish verse," and "hardly of importance" except as a monument of language. I should myself venture—with infinitely less competence in the particular language, but some knowledge of other things of the same kind and time—to call it a rather lively and accomplished performance of its class. The third piece[201] of those published, not by Sanchez himself, but as an appendix to the Paris edition, is the Adoracion de Los Santos Reyes, a poem shorter than the Santa Maria Egipciaca, but very similar in manner as well as in subject. I observe that Ticknor, in a note, seems himself to be of the opinion that these two pieces are not so old as the Apollonius; though his remarks about "the French fabliaux" are not to the point. The fabliaux, it is true, are in octosyllabic verse; but octosyllabic verse is certainly older than the fabliaux, which have nothing to do with the Lives of the Saints. But he could hardly have known this when he wrote.

[Footnote 199: Sanchez-Ochoa, op. cit., pp. 525-561.]

[Footnote 200: Ibid., pp. 561-576.]

[Footnote 201: Sanchez-Ochoa, op. cit., pp. 577-579.]

[Sidenote: Berceo.]

Berceo, who appears to have written more than thirteen thousand lines, wrote nothing secular; and though the religious poetry of the Middle Ages is occasionally of the highest order, yet when it is of that rank it is almost invariably Latin, not vernacular, while its vernacular expression, even where not despicable, is apt to be very much of a piece, and to present very few features of literary as distinguished from philological interest. Historians have, however, very properly noted in him the occurrence of a short lyrical fragment in irregular octosyllabics, each rhymed in couplets and interspersed after every line with a refrain. The only certain fact of his life seems to be his ordination as deacon in 1221.

[Sidenote: Alfonso el Sabio.]

Of King Alfonso the Learned (for he does not seem to have been by any means very wise) much more is of course known, though the saying about the blessedness of having no history is not falsified in his case. But his titular enjoyment of the empire, his difficulties with his sons, his death, practically dethroned, and the rest, do not concern us: nor does even his famous and rather wickedly wrested saying (a favourite with Carlyle) about the creation of the world and the possibility of improvement therein had the Creator taken advice. Even the far more deservedly famous Siete Partidas, with that Fuero Juzgo in which, though it was issued in his father's time, he is supposed to have had a hand, are merely noteworthy here as early, curious, and, especially in the case of the Partidas, excellent specimens of Spanish prose in its earliest form. He could not have executed these or any great part of them himself: and the great bulk of the other work attributed to him must also have been really that of collaborators or secretaries. The verse part of this is not extensive, consisting of a collection of Cantigas or hymns, Provencal in style and (to the puzzlement of historians) Galician rather than Castilian in dialect, and an alchemical medley of verse and prose called the Tesoro. These, if they be his, he may have written for himself and by himself. But for his Astronomical Tables, a not unimportant point de repere in astronomical history, he must, as for the legal works already mentioned and others, have been largely indebted. There seems to be much doubt about a prose Tresor, which is or is not a translation of the famous work of Brunetto Latini (dates would here seem awkward). But the Cronica General de Espana, the Spanish Bible, the Universal History, and the Gran Conquesta de Ultramar (this last a History of the Crusades, based partly on William of Tyre, partly on the chanson cycle of the Crusades, fables and all) must necessarily be his only in the sense that he very likely commissioned, and not improbably assisted in them. The width and variety of the attributions, whether contestable in parts or not, prove quite sufficiently for our purpose this fact, that by his time (he died in 1284) literature of nearly all kinds was being pretty busily cultivated in the Spanish vernaculars, though in this case as in others it might chiefly occupy itself with translations or adaptations of Latin or of French.

This fact in general, and the capital and interesting phenomenon of the Poema del Cid in particular, are the noticeable points in this division of our subject. It will be observed that Spain is at this time content, like Goethe's scholar, sich ueben. Her one great literary achievement—admirable in some respects, incomparable in itself—is not a novelty in kind; she has no lessons in form to give, which, like some of Italy's, have not been improved upon to this day; she cannot, like Germany, boast a great quantity of work of equal accomplishment and inspiration; least of all has she the astonishing fertility and the unceasing maestria of France. But she has practice and promise, she is doing something more than "going to begin," and her one great achievement has (it cannot well be too often repeated) the inestimable and unmistakable quality of being itself and not something else, in spirit if not in scheme, in character if not quite in form. It would be no consolation for the loss of the Cid that we have Beowulf and Roland and the Nibelungen—they would not fill its place, they do not speak with its voice. The much-abused and nearly meaningless adjective "Homeric" is here, in so far as it has any meaning, once more appropriate. Of the form of Homer there is little: of the vigour, the freshness, the poetry, there is much.



CHAPTER X.

CONCLUSION.

It is now time to sum up, as may best be done, the results of this attempt to survey the Literature of Europe during one, if not of its most accomplished, most enlightened, or most generally admired periods, yet assuredly one of the most momentous, the most interesting, the fullest of problem and of promise. Audacious as the attempt itself may seem to some, inadequate as the performance may be pronounced by others, it is needless to spend much more argument in urging its claim to be at least tried on the merits. All varieties of literary history have drawbacks almost inseparable from their schemes. The elaborate monograph, which is somewhat in favour just now, is exposed to the criticism, not quite carping, that it is practically useless without independent study of its subject, and practically superfluous with it. The history of separate literatures, whether in portion or in whole, is always liable to be charged with omissions or with disproportionate treatment within its subject, with want of perspective, with "blinking," as regards matters without. And so such a survey as this is liable to the charge of being superficial, or of attempting more than it can possibly cover, or of not keeping the due balance between its various provinces and compartments.

It must be for others to say how such a charge, in the present case, is helped by laches or incompetence on the part of the surveyor. But enough has, I hope, been said to clear the scheme itself from the objection of uselessness or of impracticability. In one sense, no doubt, far more room than this volume, or a much larger, could provide, may seem to be required for the discussion and arrangement of so great and interesting a matter as the Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. But to say this, is only saying that no such account in such a space could be exhaustive: and it so happens that an exhaustive account is for the purpose not required—would indeed go pretty far towards the defeat of that purpose. What is wanted is to secure that the reader, whether he pursues his studies in more detail with regard to any of these literatures or not, shall at any rate have in his head a fair general notion of what they were simultaneously or in succession, of the relation in which they stood to each other, of the division of literary labour between them.

If, on the other hand, it be said, "You propose to give, according to your scheme, a volume apiece to the fourteenth and even the fifteenth centuries, the work of which was far less original and interesting than the work of these two! Why do you couple these?" the answer is not difficult. In the first place, the work of these two centuries—which is mainly though not wholly the work of the hundred years that form their centre period—is curiously inseparable. In only a few cases do we know precise dates, and in many the circa is of such a circuitous character that we can hardly tell whether the twelfth or the thirteenth century deserves the credit. In almost all the adoption of any intermediate date of severance would leave an awkward, raw, unreal division. We should leave off while the best of the chansons de geste were still being produced, in the very middle of the development of the Arthurian legend, with half the fabliaux yet to come and half the sagas unwritten, with the Minnesingers in full voice, with the tale of the Rose half told, with the Fox not yet broken up.

And, in the second place, the singular combination of anonymity and school-character in the most characteristic mediaeval literature makes it easier, vast as is its mass and in some cases conspicuous as is its merit, to handle in small space than later work. Only by a wild indulgence in guessing or a tedious minuteness of attention to Lautlehre and rhyme-lists is it possible to make a treatment of even a named person like Chrestien de Troyes on the scale of a notice of Dante or even Froissart, and this without reference to the comparative literary importance of the three. The million lines of the chansons de geste do not demand discussion in anything like direct proportion to their bulk. One fabliau, much more one minnesong or troubadour lyric, has a far greater resemblance of kind to its fellows than even one modern novel, even one nineteenth-century minor poem, to another. As the men write in schools, so they can be handled in them.

Yet I should hope that it must have been already made apparent how very far the present writer is from undervaluing the period with which he has essayed to deal. He might perhaps be regarded as overvaluing it with more apparent reason—not, I think, with any reason that is more than apparent.

For this was the time, if not of the Birth—the exact times and seasons of literary births no man knoweth—at any rate of the first appearance, full-blown or full-fledged, of Romance. Many praiseworthy folk have made many efforts to show that Romance was after all no such new thing—that there is Romance in the Odyssey, Romance in the choruses of AEschylus, Romance East and West, North and South, before the Middle Ages. They are only less unwise than the other good folk who endeavour to tie Romance down to a Teutonic origin, or a Celtic, or in the other sense a Romance one, to Chivalry (which was in truth rather its offspring than its parent), to this, and that, and the other. "All the best things in literature," it has been said, "are returns"; and this is perfectly true, just as it is perfectly true in another sense that all the best things in literature are novelties. In this particular growth, being as it was a product of the unchanging human mind, there were notes, doubtless, of Homer and of AEschylus, of Solomon the son of David and of Jesus the son of Sirach. But the constituents of the mixture were newly grouped; elements which had in the past been inconspicuous or dormant assumed prominence and activity; and the whole was new.

It was even one of the few, the very few, permutations and combinations of the elements of literature, which are of such excellence, volume, durability, and charm, that they rank above all minor changes and groupings. An amabilis insania of the same general kind with those above noted has endeavoured again and again to mark off and define the chief constituents of the fact. The happiest result, if only a partial one, of such attempts has been the opposition between Classical precision and proportion and the Romantic vague; but no one would hold this out as a final or sufficient account of the matter. It may, indeed, be noted that that peculiar blended character which has been observed in the genesis of perhaps the greatest and most characteristic bloom of the whole garden—the Arthurian Legend—is to be found elsewhere also. The Greeks, if they owed part of the intensity, had undoubtedly owed nearly all the gaps and flaws of their production, as well as its extraordinarily short-lived character, to their lack alike of instructors and of fellow-pupils—to the defect in Comparison. Roman Literature, always more or less in statu pupillari, had wanted the fellow-pupils, if not the tutor. But the national divisions of mediaeval Europe—saved from individual isolation by the great bond of the Church, saved from mutual lack of understanding by the other great bond of the Latin quasi-vernacular, shaken together by wars holy and profane, and while each exhibiting the fresh characteristics of national infancy, none of them case-hardened into national insularity—enjoyed a unique opportunity, an opportunity never likely to be again presented, of producing a literature common in essential characteristic, but richly coloured and fancifully shaded in each division by the genius of race and soil. And this literature was developed in the two centuries which have been the subject of our survey. It is true that not all the nations were equally contributors to the positive literary production of the time. England was apparently paying a heavy penalty for her unique early accomplishments, was making a large sacrifice for the better things to come. Between 1100 and 1300 no single book that can be called great was produced in the English tongue, and hardly any single writer distinctly deserving the same adjective was an Englishman. But how mighty were the compensations! The language itself was undergoing a process of "inarching," of blending, crossing, which left it the richest, both in positive vocabulary and in capacity for increasing that vocabulary at need, of any European speech; the possessor of a double prosody, quantitative and alliterative, which secured it from the slightest chance of poetic poverty or hide-boundness; relieved from the cumbrousness of synthetic accidence to all but the smallest extent, and in case to elaborate a syntax equally suitable for verse and prose, for exposition and narrative, for oratory and for argument. Moreover it was, as I have at least endeavoured to show, probably England which provided the groundwork and first literary treatment, it was certainly England that provided the subject, of the largest, the most enduring, the most varied single division of mediaeval work; while the Isle of Britain furnished at least its quota to the general literature of Europe other than vernacular.

Other countries, though their languages were not conquering their conqueror as English was doing with French, also displayed sufficient individuality in dealing with the models and the materials with which French activity supplied them. The best poetical work of Icelandic, like the best work of its cousin Anglo-Saxon, was indeed over before the period began, and the best prose work was done before it ended, the rapid and never fully explained exhaustion of Norse energy and enterprise preventing the literature which had been produced from having effect on other nations. The children of the vates of Grettir and Njal contented themselves, like others, with adapting French romances, and, unlike others, they did not make this adaptation the groundwork of new and original effort. But meanwhile they had made in the Sagas, greater and lesser, such a contribution as no literature has excelled in intensity and character, comparatively small as it is in bulk and comparatively undistinguished in form.

"Unlike others," it has been said; for there can be no doubt that the Charlemagne Cycle from Northern, the troubadour lyric from Southern, France exercised upon Italy the same effect that was exercised in Germany by the romances of Arthur and of Antiquity, and by the trouvere poetry generally. But in these two countries, as also more doubtfully, but still with fair certainty, in Spain, the French models found, as they did also in England, literary capacities and tastes not jaded and outworn, but full of idiosyncrasy, and ready to develop each in its own way. Here however, by that extraordinary law of compensation which seems to be the most general law of the universe, the effects differed as much in quantity and time as in character—a remarkable efflorescence of literature in Germany being at once produced, to relapse shortly into a long sterility, a tardier but more constant growth following in England and Italy, while the effect in Spain was the most partial and obscure of all. The great names of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide hardly meet with any others in these literatures representing writers who are known abroad as well as at home. Only philologists out of England (and I fear not too many besides philologists in it) read Alisaunder and Richard Coeur de Lion, Arthour and Merlin, or the Brut; the early Italian poets shine but in the reflected light of Dante; and if any one knows the Cid, it is usually from Corneille, or Herder, or Southey, rather than from his own noble Poem. But no one who does study these forgotten if not disdained ones, no one who with a love for literature bestows even the most casual attention on them, can fail to see their meaning and their promise, their merit and their charm.

That languages of such power should have remained without literatures is of course inconceivable; that any of them even needed the instruction they received from France cannot be said positively; but what is certain is that they all received it. In most cases the acknowledgment is direct, express, not capable of being evaded or misconstrued: in all it is incapable of being mistaken by those who have eyes, and who have trained them. To inquire into the cause were rather idle. The central position of France; the early notoriety and vogue of the schools of Paris; the curious position of the language, midway between the extremer Romance and the purely Teutonic tongues, which made it a sort of natural interpreter between them; perhaps most of all that inexplicable but undeniable formal talent of the French for literature, which is as undeniable and as inexplicable as the less formal genius of the English,—all these things, except the central position, only push the problem farther back, and are in need of being explained themselves. But the fact, the solid and certain fact, remains. And so it is that the greater part of this book has necessarily been occupied in expounding, first the different forms which the lessons of France took, and then the different ways in which other countries learnt those lessons and turned them to account.

It is thus difficult to overestimate the importance of that wonderful literature which rises dominant among all these, imparting to all, borrowing from none, or borrowing only subjects, exhibiting finish of structure when all the rest were merely barbarian novices, exploring every literary form from history to drama, and from epic to song, while others were stammering their exercises, mostly learnt from her. The exact and just proportions of the share due to Southern and Northern France respectively none can now determine, and scholarship oscillates between extremes as usual. What is certain (perhaps it is the only thing that is certain) is that to Provencal belongs the credit of establishing for the first time a modern prosody of such a kind as to turn out verse of perfect form. Whether, if Pallas in her warlike capacity had been kinder to the Provencals, she could or would have inspired them with more varied kinds of literature than the exquisite lyric which as a fact is almost their sole title to fame, we cannot say. As a matter of fact, the kinds other than lyric, and some of the lyrical kinds themselves—the short tale, the epic, the romance, the play, the history, the sermon—all find their early home, if not their actual birthplace, north, not south, of the Limousin line. It was from Normandy and Poitou, from Anjou and the Orleannais, from the Isle of France and Champagne, that in language at least the patterns which were used by all Europe, the specifications, so to speak, which all Europe adapted and filled up, went forth, sometimes not to return.

Yet it is not in the actual literature of France itself, except in those contributions to the Arthurian story which, as it has been pointed out, were importations, not indigenous growths, and in some touches of the Rose, that the spirit of Romance is most evident—the spirit which, to those who have come thoroughly to appreciate it, makes classical grace and finish seem thin and tame, Oriental exuberance tasteless and vulgar, modern scientific precision inexpressibly charmless and jejune.

Different sides of this spirit display themselves, of course, in different productions of the time. There is the spirit of combat, in which the Chansons de geste show the way, anticipating in time, if not quite equalling in intensity, the Sagas and the Nibelungenlied. There is sometimes faintly mingled with this (as in the gabz of the Voyage a Constantinoble, and the exploits of Rainoart with the tinel) the spirit, half rough, half sly, of jesting, which by-and-by takes shape in the fabliaux. There is the immense and restless spirit of curiosity, which explores and refashions, to its own guise and fancy, the relics of the old world, the treasures of the East, the lessons of Scripture itself. Side by side with these there is that singular form of the religious spirit which has been so constantly misunderstood, and which, except in a very few persons, seems so rare nowadays—the faith which is implicit without being imbecile, childlike without being childish, devout with a fearless familiarity, the spirit to which the Dies Irae and the sermons of St Francis were equally natural expressions, and which, if it could sometimes exasperate itself into the practices of the Inquisition, found a far commoner and more genuine expression in the kindly humanities of the Ancren Riwle. There is no lack of knowledge and none of inquiry; though in embarking on the enormous ocean of ignorance, it is inquiry not cabined and cribbed by our limits. In particular, there is an almost unparalleled, a certainly unsurpassed, activity in metaphysical speculation, a fence-play of thought astonishing in its accuracy and style. As Poetry slowly disintegrates and exfoliates itself into Prose, literary gifts for which verse was unsuited develop themselves in the vernaculars; and the chronicle—itself so lately an epic—becomes a history, or at least a memoir; the orator, sacred or profane, quits the school rhetoric and its familiar Latin vehicle for more direct means of persuasion; the jurist gives these vernaculars precision by adopting them.

But with and through and above all these various spirits there is most of all that abstract spirit of poetry, which, though not possessed by the Middle Ages or by Romance alone, seems somehow to be a more inseparable and pervading familiar of Romance and of the Middle Ages than of any other time and any other kind of literature. The sense of mystery, which had rarely troubled the keen intellect of the Greek and the sturdy common-sense of the Roman, which was even a little degraded and impoverished (except in the Jewish prophets and in a few other places) by the busy activity of Oriental imagination, which we ourselves have banished, or think we have banished, to a few "poets' scrolls," was always present to the mediaeval mind. In its broadest and coarsest jests, in its most laborious and (as we are pleased to call them) dullest expansions of stories, in its most wire-drawn and most lifeless allegory, in its most irritating admixture of science and fable, there is always hard by, always ready to break in, the sense of the great and wonderful things of Life, and Love, and Death, of the half-known God and the unknown Hereafter. It is this which gives to Romance, and to mediaeval work generally, that "high seriousness," the want of which was so strangely cast at it in reproach by a critic who, I cannot but think, was less intimately acquainted with its literature than with that either of classical or of modern times. Constantly in mediaeval poetry, very commonly in mediaeval prose, the great things appear greatly. There is in English verse romance perhaps no less felicitous sample of the kind as it stands, none which has received greater vituperation for dulness and commonplace, than Sir Amadas. Yet who could much better the two simple lines, when the hero is holding revel after his ghastly meeting with the unburied corse in the roadside chapel?—

"But the dead corse that lay on bier Full mickle his thought was on."

In Homer's Greek or Dante's Italian such a couplet (which, be it observed, is as good in rhythm and vowel contrast as in simple presentation of thought) could hardly lack general admiration. In the English poetry of the Middle Ages it is dismissed as a commonplace.

Yet such things, and far better things, are to be met everywhere in the literature which, during the period we have had under review, took definite form and shape. It produced, indeed, none of the greatest men of letters—no Chaucer nor Dante, no Froissart even, at best for certainties a Villehardouin and a William of Lorris, a Wolfram and a Walther, with shadowy creatures of speculation like the authors of the great romances. But it produced some of the greatest matter, and some of not the least delightful handlings of matter, in book-history. And it is everywhere distinguished, first, by the adventurous fecundity of its experiments in form and kind, secondly, by the presence of that spirit which has been adumbrated in the last paragraph. In this last, we must own, the pupil countries far outdid their master or mistress. France was stronger relatively in the spirit of poetry during the Middle Ages than she has been since; but she was still weaker than others. She gave them expression, patterns, form: they found passion and spirit, with not seldom positive story-subject as well. When we come upon some nueva maestria, as the old Spanish poet called it, some cunning trick of form, some craftsman-like adjustment of style and kind to literary purposes, we shall generally find that it was invented in France. But we know that no Frenchman could have written the Dies Irae; and though we recognise French as at home in the Rose-Garden, and not out of place in the fatal meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere, it sounds but as a foreign language in the towers of Carbonek or of Montsalvatsch.



INDEX.

Abbat, Peter, 406.

Abelard, 14, 17.

Adam de la Halle, 316-321.

Adam of St Victor, 8, 10.

Alberic of Besancon, 157.

Albertus Magnus, 18.

Alcamo, Ciullo d', 387.

Alexander Hales, 18.

Alexander, romances of, chap. iv. passim.

Alfonso X., 409, 410.

Aliscans, 75 sq.

"Alison," 210, 211.

Amalricans, the, 20 note.

Amaury de Bene, 18.

Ancona, Professor d', 387.

Ancren Riwle, the, 198-201.

Anna Comnena, 378.

Anselm, 14, 17.

Apollonius, the Spanish, 407.

Aquinas, Thomas, 18.

"Arch-poet," the, 5.

Arnold, Matthew, 55, 278.

Ascham, 128.

Aucassin et Nicolette, 330-332.

Audefroy le Bastard, 275.

Aue, Hartmann von, 246-251.

Bacon, Roger, 18.

Bartsch, Herr K., 270.

Bastart de Bouillon, le, 57.

Baudouin de Sebourc, 32 sq.

Beauvais, Vincent of, 18.

Bede, 90.

Bedier, M., 276.

Benoit de Sainte-More, 177 sq.

Beowulf, 30, 36, 188.

Berceo, G., 407.

Bernard of Morlaix, 8, 11-13.

Bernard, St, 8, 322.

Bodel, Jean, 26 note, 148.

Bonaventura, 18.

Borron, Robert de, 138.

Brunetiere, M. F., 55, 83.

Brut. See Geoffrey of Monmouth, Layamon, and Wace.

Budge, Mr Wallis, 152.

Callisthenes, the Pseudo-, 152 sq.

Caradoc of Lancarvan, 91.

Carmina Burana, 4.

Celano, Thomas of, 9.

Champeaux, William of, 17.

Chrestien de Troyes, 101 sq., 195.

Cid, Poema del, 23, 376, 393, 398 sq.

Ciullo d'Alcamo, 387.

Colonna, or delle Colonne, or de Columnis, Guido, 181 sq.

Condorcet, 15.

Conquete de Constantinoble, 323.

Contrasto, 387, 389.

Conybeare, 25.

Cornu, Professor, 402.

Couronnement Loys, le, 60 sq.

Courthope, Mr, 140.

Cronica, General, 410.

Curialium, De Nugis, 141.

Dares Phrygius, 171 sq. and chap. iv. passim.

David of Dinant, 18.

Dictys Cretensis, 169 sq. and chap. iv. passim.

Dies Irae, the, 9, 10.

Dunlop, 28, 132.

Egil's Saga, 350, 360.

Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 16.

Epopees Francaises, les, 25 sq.

Erigena, John Scotus, 17.

Eschenbach, Wolfram von, 126, 251-256.

"Eternal Gospel," the, 18.

Exeter, Joseph of, 3.

Eyrbyggja Saga, 350.

Flora, Joachim of, 18.

Froude, Mr J.A., 55.

Gautier, M. Leon, 25.

Genesis and Exodus, 202.

Geoffrey, Gaimar, 98.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 94 sq. and chap. iii. passim.

Geoffroy de Villehardouin, 323 sq.

Gerard de Roussillon, 44.

Gielee, Jacquemart, 291.

Gildas, 91.

Gloucester, Robert of, 204 sq.

Golias and Goliardic Poems, 4 sq.

Gottfried von Strasburg, 242-246.

Gran Conquesta de Ultramar, 410.

Grandes Chroniques of St Denis, 327.

Grettis Saga, 351-360.

Guest, Dr, 218 sq.

Guillaume d'Orange, 59 sq.

Hallam, 28.

Hamilton, Sir W., 15.

Hartmann von Aue, 246-251.

Havelok the Dane, 207, 208.

Haureau, De la Philosophie Scolastique, 14 note, 19.

Heimskringla, 344, 361.

Heinrich von Veldeke, 242.

Henryson, 150, 272.

Historia de Proeliis, 153.

Horn (King), 208, 209.

Hunt, Leigh, 279.

Hysminias and Hysmine, 140, 377 sq.

Iter ad Paradisum, 154.

Jacopone da Todi, 8.

Jeanroy, M. A., 270.

Joachim of Flora, 18.

John of Salisbury, 17.

John Scotus Erigena, 17.

Joinville, Jean de, 328, 329.

Joly, M., 151.

Joseph of Exeter, 3.

Jus de la Feuillie, 318-321.

Koelbing, Dr, 166 note.

Koenig Rother, 237.

Kormak's Saga, 347, 360.

Kudrun, 233-236.

Lambert li Tors, 157 sq.

Lamprecht, 156.

Lang, Mr, 331.

Lanson, M., 83.

Laxdaela Saga, 349.

Layamon, 98, 99, 192-196.

Lombard, Peter, 17.

Lorris, William of, 300 sq.

Loth, M., 143.

Mabinogion, the, 105.

Madden, Sir Frederic, 97.

Malory, Sir T., 104 and chap. iii. passim.

Manasses, 379.

Map or Mapes, Walter, 4 sq., 58, 100 sq.

Marcabrun, 368

Marie de France, 285, 286, 311.

Martin, Herr, 290.

Meon, 276.

Meung, Jean de, 300 sq.

Meyer, M. Paul, 151 sq.

Michelant, M., 159.

Mill, J.S., 15.

Minnesingers, the minor, 261-264.

Missa de Potatoribus, 4.

Nennius, 91, 92.

Nibelungenlied, 227 sq.

Nicetas, 379.

Njal's Saga, 348.

Nut-Browne Maid, the, 271.

Nutt, Mr, 135.

Occam, William of, 17, 18.

Orange, William of, 59 sq.

Orm and the Ormulum, 196-198.

Owl and the Nightingale, the, 203.

Paris, M. Gaston, 25, 102 note, 212 note.

Paris, M. Paulin, 25, 97, 270.

Pater, Mr, 331.

Peacock, 142, 279.

Peter Lombard, 17.

Peter the Spaniard, 18.

Prantl, Geschichte der Logik, 14 note, 19.

Proverbs, early English, 203.

Quintus Curtius, 155.

Raymond Lully, 18.

Raynaud, M. G., 270.

Renan, M., 201.

Reynard the Fox, 286 sq.

Rhys, Professor, 136 sq.

Robert of Gloucester, 204 sq.

Robin et Marion, 317, 318.

Roland, Chanson de, 29 sq.

Romance of the Rose, the, 299 sq.

Romancero Francais, 27.

Romanzen und Pastourellen, 270.

Roscellin, 17.

Ruteboeuf, 312, 313.

Sagas, 339 sq.

Santa Maria Egipciaca, 407, 408.

Scotus Erigena, 17.

Scotus, John Duns, 18.

Siete Partidas, 409.

Specimens of Lyric Poetry, 209 sq.

Strasburg, Gottfried von, 243-246.

St Victor, Adam of, 8.

Sully, Maurice de, 323.

Swinburne, Mr, 331, 367, 370.

Theodorus Prodromus, 379.

Thomas of Celano, 9.

Thomas of Kent, 158.

Thoms, Mr, 282.

Ticknor, Mr, 393 sq.

Todi, Jacopone da, 8.

Tressan, Comte de, 28.

Tristram, Sir, 116.

Troubadours, the, 362 sq.

Troy, the Tale of, 167 sq.

Troyes, Chrestien de, 101 sq.

Turpin, Archbishop, 29.

Tyre, William of, 327.

Tyrwhitt, 25.

Valerius, Julius, 152 sq.

Veldeke, H. von, 242.

Vigfusson, Dr, 267.

Villehardouin, G. de, 323 sq.

Vincent of Beauvais, 18.

Vogelweide, Walther von der, 256-261.

Volsunga Saga, 228, 229.

Wace, 98.

Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. See Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Walter of Chatillon, 155.

Walther von der Vogelweide, 256-261.

Ward, Mr, 164.

Warton's History of Poetry, 139.

Weber, 163.

William IX., of Poitiers, 364.

William of Tyre, 327.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, 126, 251-256.

Wright, Thomas, 209.

* * * * *

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.

THE END