It belongs to the humanities, but it is not modern. The form is not that of the modern world. But the relations of the Provençal school are everywhere, and they can be proved by historical evidence without any hazardous speculation on poetical affinities. They include all sorts and degrees of poets. By contrast with what precedes 1100, the whole of modern poetry since then appears like one community. Dr Watts is related not distantly to Ariosto, if one looks at the connections of literary schools from a point at the close of the Dark Ages. The chief rules of their art were fixed for them when the Dark Ages came to an end: not in any definite manner earlier than that, but long before the Renaissance.

The Dark Ages in their more limited meaning, and for the editorial purposes of this Series, are the centuries of the barbarian migration, before the establishment of the Romance literatures, or of the kind of civilisation that is implied in them. Of literature in the Romance tongues there is little more than the rudiments to be considered before the eleventh century. The richest vernacular literature of the Dark Ages is found in other regions. The chief part of it, for students in this country, in spite of the fascinations of the Celtic genius, must be the body of the older Teutonic poetry in the Teutonic alliterative verse. This belongs properly to the Dark Ages; and it comes to an end with almost as certain a date in history as that from which the succeeding schools of Romance begin. It comes to an end before the Crusades, except in Iceland, the dissident and long-resisting country

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where the old forms of language and poetic diction are better protected than elsewhere against innovation, especially against the innovations of the Romance tongues and their poetry. Everywhere else the old forms of Teutonic literature disappear and are replaced by novelties; also the language changes. At the same time as the new literatures of France and Provence make their appearance, the older German tongues are greatly altered. There is a new English and a new German in the twelfth century: in the profession of Philology they are called Middle English and Middle German, so that the authority of Grammar is added to that of Politics and Rhetoric in marking a date about 1100 as a division between an older and a younger system of things.

In Latin, which is the principal language of the Dark Ages, there is no such decisive limit,-indeed there is no limit at all to the Latin of these times. The old Teutonic literature does not begin till the darkness has set in; it belongs to the nations who, according to the usual reckoning, were the causes of the darkness, the "Goths" of Pope's summary, and it ends, or at any rate it changes from "Old" to "Middle" with the beginning of the next period. But the Latin literature descends without a break from classical times, and it lasts for centuries after the old German tongues have been forgotten.

The Teutonic nations brought new languages and new subject-matters into the system of European literature; they also brought originality. The Latin authors had a different kind of work to do; they

carried on the traditions of classical education; they taught the liberal arts; they collected material for natural and civil history, and expounded it; they preserved the classical forms of verse and prose, with modifications according to their taste; they served the Church in the teaching of Divinity. In one kind of composition only are they innovators; the rhyming hymns are the original Latin poetry of the Dark Ages; apart from these the universal language is employed for purposes of education-to convey knowledge, or to illustrate in rhetoric the precepts of the schools. So it had been before the Dark Ages began, and so it continued afterwards. The Latin literature of the Dark Ages has not a definite character of its own, in the same way as the old Teutonic poetry. That body of poetry belongs properly to the centuries from the sixth to the eleventh. The Latin literature of the Dark Ages is not their exclusive property; it begins before them and is continued after them; its period. is a much longer one, a period which at the lowest reckoning includes the whole of the Middle Age in the old wide sense of the term, down to the Revival of Learning. Even this is too narrow, for the Latin literature of the Middle Ages is in many things conservative, and it is difficult to stop in tracing it back to its sources: many of its favourite ideas and principles are those of Cicero, and many of them were in his time far from new; and at the other end of the history there may be found a similar difficulty when things supposed to be peculiarly medieval show themselves proof against the Renaissance, surviving quite

happily in the minds and writings of humanist reformers. The German literature of the Dark Ages makes one group of writings with a life and character of its own; the Latin literature is merely a section, with an arbitrary date to mark the dividing-line.

In the vernacular literatures there is, of course, a great deal which, as far as ideas and matters are concerned, really belongs to Latin. Not all the vernacular literature is fresh, barbarous, and original; much of it is translation, much is adaptation and exposition of Latin knowledge. The significant distinction for the Dark Ages is not between Latin and vernacular utterance, but between Latin and barbarian ideas. For instance, the works of Elfric or of Notker Labeo belong to the Latin world, the common educational tradition. They are Teutonic in speech, and they come into the history of English and German culture. But they are not English and German literature in the same way as the heroic poems about Sigemund or Hildebrand.

In all sorts of ways the two influences cross and mingle, to pass into the blended stream of the later mediæval literature. One of the great attractions of the Dark Ages is that they exhibit, sometimes, more clearly than was possible later, a different kind of literary tradition from the classical; the pure elements contributed by the barbarians to the literary art of Europe. The value of this may have been exaggerated or wrongly judged by enthusiasts. But no exaggeration, and no reaction against it, can destroy the importance for literary history of the remains of that

Teutonic poetry which was least affected by Rome. Whatever its intrinsic value, it gives the starting ground, the background, the relief, in relation to which the new schools of the twelfth century are to be estimated.

The Latin literature and the Teutonic literature of the Dark Ages make up a considerable body of writings, but there are others besides, other languages and authors belonging to the history of the world and entering more or less into the common traffic of ideas. Greek, Celtic, and Arabian authors have a claim to be noticed in any full account of the literary productions of those centuries.

Greek in the Dark Ages has influence upon the West for the most part indirectly: either through its old-established partnership in Latin culture, or in ways not literary at all, by means of travellers, pilots, and traders; so that what comes through is generally either ancient, if there is any scholarship in it, or unscholarly, if it is new. The part of Greece, however, as an intermediary between the East and the West, and a channel of information, is of very great importance for the history of literary intercourse and the distribution of popular stories and popular science of all kinds. After Greek had ceased to exercise any distinctly literary influence on the West other than that which had long been known, if not exhausted, in the rhetorical schools, it continued to provide new matters for amusement and edification; saints' lives and fables, romances like that of Alexander, like Apollonius of Tyre: while doubtless in many easy