er's
German edition (Halle, 1879), the only modern or critical one, being,
I understand, out of print. It would be a good deed if the Clarendon
Press would furnish students with this, the only rival of _Beowulf_
and the _Chanson de Roland_ in the combination of antiquity and
interest.]

[Sidenote: _Catalan-Provencal._]

The earliest literature which, in the wide sense, can be called
Spanish divides itself into three heads--Provencal-Catalan;
Galician-Portuguese; and Castilian or Spanish proper. Not merely
Catalonia itself, but Aragon, Navarre, and even Valencia, were
linguistically for centuries mere outlying provinces of the _langue
d'oc_. The political circumstances which attended the dying-out of the
Provencal school at home, for a time even encouraged the continuance
of Provencal literature in Spain: and to a certain extent Spanish and
Provencal appear to have been written, if not spoken, bilingually by
the same authors. But for the general purpose of this book the fact of
the persistence of the "Limousin" tongue in Catalonia and (strongly
dialected) in Valencia having been once noted, not much further notice
need be taken of this division.

[Sidenote: _Galician-Portuguese._]

So also we may, with a brief distinctive notice, pass by the Galician
dialects which found their perfected literary form later in
Portuguese. No important early literature remains in Galician, and of
Portuguese itself there does not seem to be anything certainly dating
before the fourteenth century, or anything even probably attributed to
an earlier time except a certain number of ballads, as to the real
antiquity of which a sane literary criticism has always to reiterate
the deepest and most irremovable doubts. The fact of the existence of
this dialect, and of its development later into the language of
Camoens, is of high interest: the positive documents which at this
time it offers for comment are very scanty indeed.

[Sidenote: _Castilian._]

With Castilian--that is to say, Spanish proper--the case is very
different. It cannot claim any great antiquity: and as is the case
with Italian, and to a less degree with French also, the processes by
which it came into existence out of Latin are hid from us to a degree
surprising, even when we remember the political and social welter in
which Europe lay between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. It is,
of course, a most natural and constant consideration that the
formation of literary lan