scourge of the friars died in the arms of friars, bequeathing to them his manuscripts, hoping only for salvation through their prayers. Yet the disowned and proscribed Decamerone became the text-book of pure Italian. Florence, the capital of letters, insisted on the indefeasible prerogative of the Florentine dialect, and the Decamerone was ruled to be the one example of Florentine. The Church was embarrassed; in vain the Decamerone was corrected, mutilated, interpolated, and indecencies, profanenesses annulled, erased: all was without effect; the Decamerone must not be degraded from its high and exemplary authority. The purity of morals might suffer, the purity of the language must remain unattainted; till at length an edition was published in which the abbesses and nuns, who were enamoured of their gardeners, became profane matrons and damsels; friars, who wrought false miracles, necromancers; adulterous priests, soldiers. But this last bold effort of jesuitical ingenuity was without effect: the Decamerone was too strong for the censure in all its forms; it shook off its fetters, obstinately refused to be altered, as before it had refused to be chastened; and remains to this day at once the cleverest and bitterest satire,

* See in the works of Petrarch the very curious letter to Boccaccio, de Vaticinio Morientium, Opera, p. 740. Boccaccio had written in a paroxysm of superstitious terror to Petrarch concerning the prophecies of a certain holy man, Peter of Sienna, on the death of the two poets. Petrarch evidently does not believe a word of what had frightened poor Boccaccio. He alleges many causes of suspicion. "Non extenuo

VOL. IX.

vaticinii pondus, quicquid a Christo dicitur verum est. Fieri nequit ut veritas mentiatur. At id quæritur Christusne rei hujus autor sit, an alter quispiam ad commenti fidem, quod sæpe vidimus, Christi nomen assumpserit." The poet urges Boccaccio, at great length, not to abandon letters, but only the lighter letters of his youth.

P

and the most curious illustration of the religion of the age.

CHAPTER VI.

Language of France.

France.

NOTHING is more remarkable in the civil or in the religious history of the West, nothing led to more momentous or enduring results, than the secession, as it were, of the great kingdom of France from the Teutonic, and its adhesion to the Latin division of Christendom; the fidelity of its language to its Roman descent, and its repudiation of the German conqueror. For about four centuries, loosely speaking, Gaul, from the days of Julius Cæsar, was a province of the Roman Empire. During that period it became Romanised in manners, institutions, language. The Celtic dialect was driven up into the North-Western corner of the land. If it subsisted, as seems to have been the case in the time of Irenæus, still later in that of Jerome, or in the fifth century, as the dialect of some of the peasantry; if it left its vestiges in the names of plains, of forests and mountains ; if even some sounds and words found their way into the supervening Latin, and became a feeble

a According to Ulpian in the second | speak in Gallic or Celtic (Dialog. i. century wills might be drawn in Latin sub fine). Sidonius Apollinarius says or in the language of Gaul, the Celtic that the nobles of his province (Autherefore had a legal existence. St. vergne) had only just cast off all the Jerome in the fourth century compares scales of their Celtic speech; this may the language of the Asiatic Galatians have been the pronunciation. with that which he had heard spoken father of Ausonius, a physician at Bazas in the neighbourhood of Treves. In in Aquitaine, spoke Latin imperfectly. the fifth, Sulpicius Severus desires one Compare Ampère, Hist. Lit. de la of the interlocutors in a dialogue to France, pp. 36 and 136.

The

constituent of French; yet there can be no doubt that the great mass of the French language, both the Langue d'Oil of the North, and the Langue d'Oc of the South, is of Latin origin.b

For about four centuries, Teutonic tribes, Goths, Burgundians, Alemannians, Franks, ruled in Gaul, from the first inroad and settlement of the Visigoths in the South, down to the third generation after Charlemagne. Clovis and his race, Charlemagne and his immediate descendants, were Teutons; the language at the Court of Soissons, in the capitals of Neustria and Austrasia, as afterwards in that of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle, was German. Nor was it only so in the Court; there were Germans throughout the Frankish realm of Charlemagne. The Council of Tours enacts that every Bishop should have homilies in both languages; he should be able to expound them in the rustic Roman and in the Teutonic, so as to be intelligible to the whole people.

But the grandsons of Charlemagne behold Latin and

Separation.
A.D. 842.

Teutonic nationality, the Latin and Teutonic

language, dividing the Western Empire. The German is withdrawing, if not beyond the Rhine, to the provinces bordering on the Rhine; Latin is resuming its full dominion over France and the French language. At Strasburg, only thirty years after the Council of Tours, France has become French, Germany German.

b M. Fauriel (Histoire de la Poesie Provençale, i. p. 195) observes of the Provençal that there are more words not of Latin origin than is commonly supposed. He had collected 3000. The whole Provençal literature might perhaps furnish him as many. A great part he could trace to no known language. Some few are Arabic, many

Greek, some Celtic, some Basque; not above fifteen Teutonic. The whole investigation is worthy of study.

C A.D. 812. Labbe, Concil. vii. 1263. This injunction was renewed at Rheims and at Mentz A.D. 847. There are fragments of old German sermons.-Raumer, p. 66.

The two Kings of the same race, equally near in blood to Charlemagne, take their oaths in languages not only dialectically different, but distinct in root and origin. Germany still recedes, leaving but few traces of its long dominion; the Celtic element probably contributes more to the French language than the German. In truth the Germans after all were but an armed oligarchy in France, like the Turks in their European provinces, but by no means so inaccessibly shut up in their Oriental habits, in their manners, in their religion. Even in the Visigothic South, no sooner had the conquest passed over, than the native language, or rather the naturalised Latin, reasserted its independence, its jealous and exclusive superiority: and this, although the Goths were routed and driven out by another Teutonic race, the Franks of the North. France returned entirely to its Latinity; and from its rustic Roman gradually formed that language which was to have such wide influence on later civilisation.

In this conservation of France to Latin and Latin Christianity, no doubt Latin Christianity, and the hierarchy so long, even under the German sway, of Latin descent, powerfully contributed. The unity of religion in some degree broke down the barrier between the Teuton and the Roman Gaul; they worshipped the same God in the same Church; looked for absolution from their sins, trembled before, or sought humbly the counsel of the same Priest. But the Clergy, as has been seen, remained long almost exclusively Roman. The Teutons, who aspired to the high places of the Church (for the services remained obstinately Roman), were compelled to possess one qualification, the power of ministering in that Latin service. The most rude, most ignorant, most worldly Bishop or Priest must learn something, and that lesson must be the