L FALLACIES, AND FINAL
PERVERSITIES THEREOF.

[Sidenote: _Special interest of Early Middle English._]

The positive achievements of English literature, during the period
with which this volume deals, are not at first sight great; and all
the more finished literary production of the time, till the extreme
end of it, was in French and Latin. But the work done during this time
in getting the English language ready for its future duties, in
equipping it with grammar and prosody, in preparing, so to speak, for
Chaucer, is not only of the first importance intrinsically, but has a
value which is almost unique in general literary history as an
example. Nowhere else have we the opportunity of seeing a language and
a literature in the process of gestation, or at least of a reformation
so great as to be almost equal to new birth. Of the stages which
turned Latin through the Romanic vulgar tongues into Spanish, Italian,
Portuguese, Provencal, French, we have the very scantiest remains; and
though the Strasburg oaths and the Eulalia hymn are no doubt
inestimable in their way, they supply exceedingly minute and
precarious stepping-stones by which to cross from Ausonius to the
_Chanson de Roland_. From the earliest literary stages of the Teutonic
tongues we have, except in the case of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, very
little wreckage of time; and Anglo-Saxon at least presents the
puzzling characteristic that its earliest remains are, _coeteris
paribus_, nearly as complete and developed as the earliest remains of
Greek. In German itself, whether High or Low, the change from oldest
to youngest is nothing like the change from the English of _Beowulf_
to the English of Browning. And though the same process of primordial
change as that which we have seen in English took place certainly in
German, and possibly in the Romance tongues, it is nowhere traceable
with anything like the same clearness or with such gradual
development. By the eleventh century at latest in France, by the end
of the twelfth in Germany, verse had taken, in the first case fully,
in the second almost fully, a modern form. In England it was, during
the two hundred years from 1150 to 1350, working itself steadily, and
with ample examples, from pure accent to accentual quantity, and from
alliteration to rhyme. Of this process, and those similar to it in
other countries, we shall give an account which will serve for the
whole in the latter part of this chapter; the a