n in the course of their history the nations of Western and
Northern Europe have had to struggle hard for the preservation of their
national life against a powerful denationalising influence proceeding from
Rome. Those among them who underwent the Roman conquest lost early,
together with their liberty, their most precious national possession,
their native language and with it their vernacular literature. Less than a
century after the slaughter of Vercingetorix Romanised Gauls were
carrying off the palm of Roman eloquence. By the fifth century the Gaulish
language was everywhere extinct, without having left behind a single
record of its literature. The same fate was shared by all Celtic
nationalities of the Continent, and by those numerous Germanic tribes that
were conquered by Rome, or came within the sphere of the later Roman
civilisation. In Britain, where the Roman occupation was only temporary,
its denationalising effect may be gauged by the numerous Latin loan-words
preserved to the present day in the Welsh language, by the partial
Romanisation of British personal proper names, by the early inscribed
stones, which, unlike those of Ireland, are all in Latin, and by the late
and slow beginnings of a literature in the vernacular.

It was only on the outskirts of the Continental world, and beyond the sway
and influence of the Roman Empire, that some vigorous nations preserved
their national institutions intact, and among them there are only three
whom letters reached early enough to leave behind some record of their
pagan civilisation in a vernacular literature. These were the Irish, the
Anglo-Saxons, and, comparative latecomers, the Icelanders.

Again, when Christianity came with the authority of Rome and in the Latin
language, now imbued with an additional sanctity, there ensued in all
nations a struggle between the vernacular and the foreign tongue for
obtaining the rank of a literary language--a struggle from which the
languages of the Continental nations, as well as of Britain, emerged only
slowly and late. It is not till the end of the eleventh century that we
find the beginnings of a national literature in France and Germany. In
Ireland, on the other hand, which had received her Christianity not direct
from Rome but from Britain and Gaul, and where the Church, far removed
from the centre of Roman influence and cut off from the rest of
Christendom, was developing on national lines, vernacular literature
received