or rather perhaps Roger of Wendover, takes a wider range: he travels beyond the limits of England; he almost aspires to be a chronicler of Christendom. The histories of the Crusades are lively, picturesque, according as they come directly from the Crusaders themselves. Perhaps the most elaborate, William of Tyre, being a compilation, is least valuable and least effective. Lambert of Hertzfield (vulgarly of Aschaffenburg) in my judgement occupies, if not the first, nearly the first place, in mediæval history. He has risen at least towards the grandeur of his subject. Our own chroniclers, Westminster, Knighton, and Walsingham, may vie with the best of other countries. As to their Latinity, Saxo Grammaticus, the Sicilian Ugo Falcandus, command a nobler and purer style.

Yet after all the Chronicle must, to attain its perfection, speak in the fresh picturesqueness, the freedom, and the energy of the new vernacular languages. The Latin, though in such universal use, is a foreign, a conventional tongue even among Churchmen and in the monastery. Statesmen, men of business, men of war, must begin to relate the affairs of States, the adventures and events of war. For the perfect Chronicle we must await Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart. Villani is more than a chronicler; he is approaching to the historian.

CHAPTER V.

Christian Letters in the New Languages of Europe.

CHRISTIANITY, indeed, must await, and not in history alone, the creation, growth, perfection of new languages, before she can become the parent of genuine Christian letters and arts-of letters and arts which will maintain permanent influence and ascendancy over the mind of man. But the abrogation of the Latin as the exclusive language of Christian letters and arts must be inevitably and eventually the doom of Latin Christianity. Latin must recede more and more into a learned language understood by the few. It may linger in the religious service of all who adhere to the Church of Rome, not absolutely unintelligible to those whose language is of Latin descent, and among them with a kind of mysterious and venerable indistinctness not unfavourable to religious awe. The Latin is a congenial part of that imposing ritual system which speaks by symbolic gestures and genuflexions, by dress, by music, by skilful interchange of light and darkness, by all which elevates, soothes, rules the mind through the outward senses. A too familiar Liturgy and Hymnology might disturb this vague, unreasoning reverence. With the coarsest and most vulgar Priesthood these services cannot become altogether vulgar; and except to the strongest or most practical minds, the clear and the definite are often fatal to the faith. Yet for popular instruction either from the Pulpit or through the Printing Press, Christianity

must descend, as it does descend, to the popular language. In this respect Latin has long discharged its mission—it is antiquated and obsolete.

But while the modern languages of Europe survive; and we can hardly doubt the vitality of French, Italian, Spanish, German, and our own English (now the vernacular tongue of North America and Australia, that too of government and of commerce in vast regions of Africa and Asia), the great Christian writers, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Calderon; Pascal, Bossuet, and the pulpit orators of France, with Corneille and Racine; the German Bible of Luther, the English Bible, Shakspeare, Milton, Schiller, some of our great divines, Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, will only die with the languages in which they wrote. Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Reid, Kant, will not share the fate of the scholastic philosophers, till the French, English, and German are to new races of men what medieval Latin is to us. And religion must speak to mankind in the dominant languages of mankind.

It might seem indeed that in the earliest Latin as distinguished from the Teutonic languages, the Romance in its various forms, Sicilian, Italian, Catalan, Provençal, poetry, the primal form of vernacular literature was disposed to break loose from Latin Christianity, from hierarchical unity, even from religion. The Clergy in general remained secluded or shrunk back into the learned Latin; the popular poetry, even the popular prose, became profane, unreligious, at length in some part irreligious. The Clergy, as has been seen, for their own use and amusement, transmuted much of the popular poetry into Latin, but it ceased thereby to be popular except among themselves. They shut themselves up from the awakening and stirring world in their sanctity, their authority, their learning, their wealth.

The

Jongleurs, the Trouvères, the Troubadours, became in a certain sense the popular teachers; the Bards and the sacerdotal order became separate, hostile to each other. The Clergy might seem almost content with the intellect of man; they left the imagination, except so far as it was kept enthralled by the religious ceremonial, to others. Perhaps the Mysteries, even the early Latin Mysteries, chiefly arose out of the consciousness of this loss of influence; it was a strong effort to recover that which was gliding from their grasp. Some priests were Troubadours, not much to the elevation of their priestly character; Troubadours became priests, but it was by the renunciation of their poetic fame; and by setting themselves as far asunder as possible from their former brethren. Fulk of Marseilles a became the furious persecutor of those who had listened with rapture to his poetry. Later one of the most famous of the schoolmen was said to have been a Troubadour.b

Chivalry alone, so far as chivalry was Christian, held poetry to the service of Christianity, and even of the Church; but this was chiefly among the Trouvères of Northern France or the Langue d'Oil. The Provençal poetry of the South, the cradle of modern song, contains some noble bursts of the Crusading religious sentiment; it is Christian, if chivalry be Christian, in tone and thought. But, in general, in the castle courts of the

For the history of Fulk of Marseilles, whose poetic fame endured to the days of Dante, see back, vol. v. p. 412.

No less a person than William Durand, the great general of the Pope, the great Ecclesiastical Legist, almost the last great Schoolman, the author of the Speculum and the Rationale, is traditionally reported to have been a

Troubadour. A tale is told of him very similar to that of Romeo and Juliet. Conceive Romeo growing up into a High Churchman and a Schoolman!-Ritter, Christliche Philosophie, vii. p. 19. The question is examined with fairness and sagacity in the xxth vol. of the Hist. Lit. de la France, p. 435.

Provençal Princes and Nobles poetry not only set itself above Christian religion, but above Christian moralɛ. The highest Idealism was amatory Platonism, which while it professed religious adoration of woman, degraded her by that adoration. It may be doubted whether it could ever have broken forth from that effeminacy to which it had condemned itself. Grace, perhaps tenderness, was its highest aim; and Poetry soars not above its aim. But this subject has already found its place in our history. In its lower and popular form Provençal poetry, not less immoral, was even more directly antihierarchical. It was not heretical, for it had not religion enough to be heretical: religion was left to the heretic. The Fabliau, the Satire, the Tale, or the Song, were the broad and reckless expression of that aversion and contempt into which the Clergy of Southern France had fallen, and tended immeasurably to deepen that aversion and contempt. But it has been sadly shown how the Albigensian war crushed the insurrection of Provençal poetry against Latin letters, together with the insurrection against the Latin hierarchy. The earliest vernacular poetry perished almost without heirs to its fame ; its language, which once divided France, sunk into a provincial dialect.

Christendom owes to Dante the creation of Italian Poetry, through Italian, of Christian Poetry. It required all the courage, firmness, and prophetic sagacity of Dante to throw aside the inflexible bondage of the established hierarchical Latin of Europe. He had almost yielded and had actually commenced the Divine Comedy in the ancient, it seemed, the universal and eternal language.d

c Even in our days Provence has a poet, and that of no undeserved fame, Jasmine: of course, the language has

undergone inuch change.

d Compare among other authorities the valuable essay of Perticari, the