animated England. While Normans and Saxons regarded each other as conquerors and conquered, neither of them could create a literature. The Normans speaking the Northern French dialect, and despising the language of the Saxons, belonged really to France, as their country, and drew their literary inspiration from thence. They were, however, too much separated from the French centres of literary cultivation to partake of the fulness of their creative force, and too much mixed with the Saxons to form a pure literary centre of their own. The Saxons, conscious of subjection, and accepting it as an accomplished fact, had neither the elevation of spirit nor the prospect of honour which are necessary for the inspiration of genius. Their real world was too much at variance with the ideal world of genius, for them to enter there. What had they to do with glory, or beauty, or visions of pleasure unrestrained? Even if they did indulge in such dreams, their productions would have been despised as Saxon by the ruling class, who had in their hands the distribution of the highest honours, and would perhaps have met with faint praise from their own brethren; for when a people is quite subdued, a common shame depresses them all, and makes them discountenance one another. But all this had passed away in Chaucer's time. The loss of the principal French possessions of the English crown in the reign of John, had to a great degree disconnected the English court and nobility from France. Edward the First had been wise enough to see that his real greatness was to be sought in Britain, and instead of employing his arms

in endeavouring to recover the French possessions, had employed them in Wales and Scotland. During this and the subsequent reign, the Normans were gradually coalescing with the Saxons into one people; but still French was the language of the upper classes, and French and Latin the only languages taught in the schools. It was when England and France were arrayed against each other in the wars of Edward the Third, that the Anglo-Norman at length looked on the Frenchman as his enemy and on the Anglo-Saxon as his countryman, and on the fields of Crecy and Poictiers Normans and Saxons learned to honour each other as Englishmen. The English language was at once adopted by the upper classes, and the French laid aside; and the change took place with a rapidity which clearly indicates the sudden spring of national spirit and national pride in England. It was at this outburst of national life that Chaucer appeared, and we can readily conceive how it must have quickened his genius. It would awaken within him the consciousness of his powers and elevate his ambition. For there breathed then throughout the nation a spirit of conscious greatness; and the sense of national glory naturally elevated the thoughts of all, and kindled in every finer spirit a deep thirst for fame. Fame, too, was ready to proclaim the founder of English literature; for then first, England, conscious of herself, could take pride in him as her own, and hailing him with the enthusiasm which at that time everything English inspired, could confer on him an honour heightened by all the glory which she had won. Such was the native impulse which

genius received at this time in England. But were its fruits the pure product of this native impulse, or are we indebted for them to the influence of a foreign literature?

There is no poet who seems to be more indebted to foreign literature than Chaucer, and yet there are few in whom we can more clearly distinguish what the author produced himself from what he got from others. It is to be observed, however, that what Chaucer adopted from others and made his own, was, for the most part, taken by him from those who had themselves got it from their predecessors. It formed part of a literary treasure which had been amassed when the European nations, in their upper classes, scarcely differed from each other, and which seemed therefore to belong equally to them all. Indeed, one of the principal centres where this common literature had been produced was the Norman court of the Norman princes; and as it could scarcely be considered foreign literature at their court in London, it was to Chaucer much the same that the previous literature of his country is to every poet. It was, however, though Norman, yet not English, and must, with reference to English literature, be considered foreign; and as it exerted a most profound influence on English as on all other modern literature, we have to inquire from what source sprang, and what was its essential nature.

it

Modern literature seems to owe its birth to the union of the Germanic and the Celtic mind. It was born in the South of France, out of the enthusiasm engendered by the high-souled heroism with which Gothic chivalry

The

gradually won back Spain from the Saracens. The spirit of poetry, which arose out of this exaltation of sentiment, having taken a form, borrowed perhaps in part from Arabian verse, found a congenial home at the end of the eleventh century in the kingdom of Provence, which had enjoyed peace for upwards of two hundred years. There the Troubadours formed the first school of modern poetry; and though in contact with Arabian influences, that poetry seems to have been but slightly and superficially affected by those influences. sentiments of the Troubadours were those of chivalry; and this at once marks their poetry as springing from a source different from Arab literature, in which, according to Sismondi, military achievement produces no enthusiasm, but is thought only in connection with terror and desolation. The Troubadour poetry may indeed have derived the great artifice and complexity of its versification from Arabian verse, but not that principle of rhythmical harmony and rhyme which distinguishes modern from ancient European poetry. Our modern system of verse, in which the harmony arises from the regular recurrence of accent and rhyme, was known in Europe long before the Saracens made any settlement there. It sprang naturally from the pronunciation and formation of the languages which grew out of the Latin.*

*The distinction of the vowels as long and short, on which the structure of ancient verse depended, was not strictly observed in pronunciation by the foreign subjects of Rome, when they adopted the Latin language. There was to them no inherent expressiveness of meaning in the quantity of the vowel; but having adopted

If Mr. Hallam gives a correct description of the Provençal poetry, the character of Celtic genius is very plainly marked on it. He says, "In all these light

the word as an arbitrary sign of its idea, they always tended to pronounce it in the way most convenient to their organs. Now the emphasis of accentuation not only raises the tone, but also tends to dwell on the sound, absorbing quantity into accent; and it was owing to this natural tendency, that accent gradually supplanted quantity in the Latinized parts of Europe, as it had probably always predominated over it in the strongly accented Germanic languages. Thus the rhythmical harmony of recurrent accentuation is to be regarded as a native feature in all modern European verse.

Rhyme was not employed to increase the harmony of ancient poetry; for in the ancient languages the endings of the words expressed grammatical relations, and the recurrence of the same endings would have made the correspondence of the lines excessive, as it would have conveyed a sense not only of similar sound, but also of similarity in the form of the thoughts. But when those grammatical endings were lost in the Romance languages, rhyme was felt to be an appropriate ornament of verse: and as these were gradually given up the voice, half prepared to sound them, dwelt more fully on the last syllable, and the ear noticed the more readily the correspondence of the final sounds of successive verses. This tendency was promoted in France by the habit, natural to French thought, of rapidly thinking the parts, and then noting the effect of the whole. On the Germanic languages indeed, owing probably to the strength of articulation in Germanic utterance and to the tendency to accentuate the first syllable, alliteration, or the recurrence of the same initial consonant, was originally used to heighten the effect of the verse. But in Celtic utterance, the voice dwells on the conclusion of a clause, and as alliteration was proper to the German, rhyme was suited to the Celt. That English verse has adopted rhyme, and given up alliteration, is perhaps to be noted as a foreign influence on English literature, exerted by Romance poetry.

1 See "Afternoon Lectures," First Series, p. 5.