treated was called a palimpsest. When the characters had become much faded through lapse of time, the same motive scarcity of materialled to the practice of writing a new work across the old one without resorting to erasure. A manuscript so dealt with was called a codex rescriptus. But since, in manuscripts of the first kind, the process of erasure was often imperfectly performed, and in those of the second, the old faded letters can often, with a little trouble, be distinguished beneath the newer ones, it has happened that valuable copies, or fragments, of ancient works have in both these ways been recovered.* Paper made from linen or cotton rags is an Arabian invention; and the first paper, nearly resembling that which we now use, was made at Mecca in the year 706. The knowledge of the art soon passed into Spain, and by the Moors was communicated to the Christians. But it was not till towards the close of the thirteenth century that paper mills were established in the Christian states of Spain, whence, in the following century, the art passed into Italy, and became generally diffused.

Poetry.

It may be stated broadly, that from the eleventh to the thirteenth century inclusive, the prose literature of Europe came from churchmen, the poetry from laymen. But in one direction the churchmen made incursions into the domain of their rivals without fear of competition or reprisals. We refer to the Latin poetry of the Middle Ages. Much of this owed its existence to a spirited but hopeless endeaone which even Erasmus was disposed to repeat a hundred and fifty years later-to make the Latin the universal language of literature. All the existing vernacular

vour

*The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, at Paris, a manuscript of the Greek Testament of the highest value, written over with a work of St. Ephrem, is a case in point.

tongues-though some were more advanced than otherswere not to be compared in respect of regularity and euphony to the Latin; and the poets of the cloister preferred to write elegant hexameters and elegiacs after the model of their beloved Virgil and Ovid rather than engage in a struggle with the harsh dissonances and unmanageable particles of their native speech. One concession they did make to the fashion of their own age, when, forsaking the classic metres, they sought for that measured melody which is the essential form of poetry in the Arabic—or possibly Celtic-invention of rhyme, by this time (1100) completely naturalised in the south of Europe. These Latin rhymes were called Leonine verses. The solemn hymns of the Church some of which are unsurpassed even as literary compositions were composed in these rhyming measures; among their authors were St. Anselm, St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Pope Innocent III. The majority of these were written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. No Latin poems of this elevated class were composed by English ecclesiastics, but leonine verse was largely used in this country as a vehicle for satire and humour. There is among the publications of the Camden Society a thick volume of such Latin poems, of many among which the authorship is ascribed to one Walter Mapes or Map, who flourished towards the end of the thirteenth century. But the strict Latinists scouted the idea of any such concessions to a corrupt modern taste; when they wrote poetry, they used the metres as well as the language of the Latin poets. Thus Geoffrey de Vinesauf, who has been already mentioned among the historians, wrote a Latin poem entitled De Nová Poetriâ, and addressed to Innocent III., the intention of which was to recommend and illustrate the legitimate mode of versification, in opposition to the leonine or barbarous species. Actuated by the same prepossessions, Josephus Iscanus, a monk of Exeter, who flourished about the year 1210,

wrote a long poem in Latin hexameters, entitled De Bello Trojano which, to judge of it from the extracts printed by Warton, must have possessed great literary merit. Though now forgotten, it enjoyed so great a popularity even as late as the fifteenth century, as to be thumbed by school-boys in every grammar-school, and ranked by teachers side by side with the genuine poets of Rome.

But this fanatical preference of a dead language, even as the medium for poetry, could not in the nature of things hold its ground. In poetry, the originality of the thought, the vigour and aptness of the expression, are what constitutes the charm; we read it, not that we may learn about things, but that we may come in contact with thoughts. But no one can think with perfect freedom except in his native tongue, nor express himself with remarkable degrees of force and fire, unless upon subjects coming closely home to his feelings. To an ecclesiastic, whose home is the church, the church's language may perhaps be considered in one sense as his natural speech, so long as his thoughts are busied with those objects on which her attention and affections are uninterruptedly concentred. Thus no poem more startlingly real, more tender, more awe-inspiring, exists in any language than the wonderful sequence "Dies Iræ, dies illa." But for the themes of love, or war, or gaiety, with which poetry is principally conversant, the Latin could not be so apt a medium as the roughest of the vernacular tongues, since to the ear accustomed to the vivid and expressive utterances on these subjects to which the converse of daily life of necessity gives rise, its phrases must always have seemed cold, flat, and indirect. Hence as the Trouvères and their imitators rise and multiply, the school of Latin poetry dwindles away, and after the middle of the thirteenth century nearly disappears.

The poetry which, strong in its truth to nature, supplanted its more polished rival, was the growth of France;

and to trace its origin, and analyse its many developments, is no part of the task of the historian of English literature. It is necessary, however, that the English student should have some general knowledge of the matter; otherwise he would very imperfectly understand the course of English poetry in this and in the following period.

The French poetry of the age was divided into two schools, the Norman and the Provençal. The poets of the one were called Trouvères, those of the other, Troubadours. The language of the one was the Langue d'oil, that of the other the Langue d'oc. The poetry of the Trouvères was mostly epic in its character; that of the Troubadours mostly lyric. Each most probably arose independently of the other, although that of the Troubadours sprang the soonest into full maturity, as it was also the first to decline and pass away. The origin of the Provençal literature is to be sought in the amicable intercourse which subsisted during the ninth and tenth centuries between the Moorish and the Christian states of Spain, resulting for the latter in their acquaintance with, and imitation of, the Arabic poetry and prose fiction. The poems of those children of the burning South were distinguished by an almost idolatrous exaltation of the female sex, and an inexhaustible inventiveness in depicting every phase, and imagining every condition, of the passion of love. The Catalan minstrels took up the strain in their own language, which was a variety of the langue d'oc; and from Catalonia, upon its being united to a portion of Provence, in 1092, under Raymond Berenger, the newly kindled flame of romantic sentiment and idealizing passion passed into the south of France, and gave birth to the poetry of the Troubadours. Of this poetry, love is the chief, though not the sole, inspiration. It neglects the

* So called from the different words signifying "yes" in the two languages.

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realities of life; it is impatient of historical themes which require learning and toil; it is essentially fugitive subjective conventional. In a certain sense it may be called abstract poetry, since throughout a large portion of it the reader is removed from the world of concrete existences, and placed in an imaginary realm, peopled by beings who own no laws but the conventional decrees of a Court of Love, and know no higher ambition. than that of being a successful suitor. Such a style evidently contains within itself the germ of a certain dissolution, unless it admit of change and enrichment from without. But external circumstances accelerated the fall of the literature of the Troubadours; the bloody wars of which the south of France was the theatre during the early part of the thirteenth century, silenced the minstrel's lute, and substituted the wail of the mourner for the song of the lover. Attempts were subsequently made, down even to the fifteenth century, to revive the ancient style; but they failed to impart to it more than a transient and factitious vitality. But in its flourishing time, the Gay Science was eagerly cultivated in every part of Western Europe, and kings were proud to rank themselves among its members. Our own Richard Coeur-de-Lion not only entertained at his court some of the most celebrated Troubadours of Provence, but himself composed several sirventes which are still extant. A tenson, the joint composition of himself and his favourite minstrel Blondel, is said, according to the well-known story in Matthew Paris, to have been the means of Blondel's discovering the place of the king's confinement in Germany.

Almost the whole of the poetry of the Troubadours falls under two heads; the tenson and the sirvente." The former was a kind of literary duel, or dialogue contro

*Tenson is connected by Raynouard with "contention." Ducange explains sirventes as poemata in quibus servientium, seu militum, facta et servitia referuntur."

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