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 gardenthe 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 shortlived 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 medieval 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

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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 medieval 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 trouvère 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 Cœur 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