th, fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries with a long but straggling introduction, ranging
from the eighth or even the seventh. Its palmy time is unquestionably in
the twelfth and the thirteenth. During these two hundred years almost
every kind of literature is attempted. Vast numbers of epic poems are
written; one great story, that of Arthur, exercises the imagination as
hardly any other story has exercised it either in ancient or in modern
times; the drama is begun in all its varieties of tragedy, comedy, and
opera; lyric poetry finds abundant and exquisite expression; history
begins to be written, not indeed from the philosophic point of view, but
with vivid and picturesque presentment of fact; elaborate codes are
drawn; vernacular homilies, not mere rude colloquial discourses, are
composed; the learning of the age, such as it is, finds popular
treatment; and in particular a satiric literature, more abundant and
more racy if less polished than any that classical antiquity has left
us, is committed to writing. It is often wondered at and bewailed that
this vigorous growth was succeeded by a period of comparative stagnation
in which little advance was made, and in which not a little decided
falling off is noticeable. Except the formal lyric poetry of the
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the multiplied dramatic
energy of the latter, nothing novel or vigorous appears for some hundred
and forty years, until the extreme verge of the period, when the
substitution of the prose tale, as exemplified in the work attributed to
Antoine de la Salle, for the verse Fabliau, opens a prospect which four
centuries of progress have not closed. The early perfection of Italian,
a language later to start than French, has been regretfully compared
with this, and the blame has been thrown on the imperfection of
mediaeval arrangements for educating the people. The complaint is
mistaken, and almost foolish. It is not necessary to look much further
than Italian itself to see the Nemesis of a too early development.
French, like English, which had a yet tardier literary growth, has
pursued its course unhasting, unresting, to the present hour. Italian
since the close of the sixteenth century has contributed not a single
masterpiece to European literature, and not much that can be called good
second-rate. It is not impossible that the political troubles of
France--the Hundred Years' War especially--checked the intellectual
developmen