t of the country, but if so, the check was in the long run
altogether salutary. The middle ages were allowed to work themselves
out--to produce their own natural fruit before the full influx of
classical literature. What is more, a breathing time was allowed after
the exhaustion of the first set of influences, before the second was
felt. Hence the French renaissance was a far more vigorous growth than
the renaissance of Italy, which displays at once the signs of precocity
and of premature decay. But we are more immediately concerned at the
present moment with the literary results of the middle ages themselves.
It is only of late years that it has been possible fully to estimate
these, and it is now established beyond the possibility of doubt that to
France almost every great literary style as distinguished from great
individual works is at this period due. The testimony of Brunetto Latini
as to French being the common literary tongue of Europe in the
thirteenth century has been quoted, and those who have read the
foregoing chapters attentively will be able to recall innumerable
instances of the literary supremacy of France. It must of course be
remembered that she enjoyed for a long time the advantage of enlisting
in her service the best wits of Southern England, of the wide district
dominated by the Provencal dialects, and of no small part of Germany and
of Northern Italy. But these countries took far more than they gave: the
Chansons de Gestes were absorbed by Italy, the Arthurian Romances by
Germany; the Fabliaux crossed the Alps to assume a prose dress in the
Southern tongue; the mysteries and miracles made their way to every
corner of Europe to be copied and developed. To the origination of the
most successful of all artificial forms of poetry--the sonnet--France
has indeed no claim, but this is almost a solitary instance. The three
universally popular books (to use the word loosely) of profane
literature in the middle ages, the epic of Arthur, the satire of Reynard
the Fox, the allegorical romance of the Rose, are of French origin. In
importance as in bulk no literature of these four centuries could dare
to vie with French.

This astonishing vigour of imaginative writing was however accompanied
by a corresponding backwardness in the application of the vernacular to
the use of the exacter and more serious departments of letters. Before
Comines, the French chronicle was little more than gossip, though it was
often t