its way upwards. There was a public ready to
read vernacular books, and not at home with French. For their sake a
great literature of translations and adaptations was made, beginning
with Layamon's English version of Wace's _Brut_, which by the end of
the century made the cycle of French romance accessible to the English
reader. Many works of edification and devotion were written in English;
and Robert of Gloucester's rhyming history appealed to a larger public
than the Yorkshire French of Langtoft. It is significant of the trend
of events that the early fourteenth century saw Langtoft himself done
into English by Robert Mannyng, of Bourne. While as yet no continuous
works of high merit were written in English, there was no lack of
experiments, of novelties, and of adaptations. Much evidence of depth
of feeling, power of expression, and careful art lies hidden away in
half-forgotten anonymous lyrics, satires, and romances. The language in
which these works were written was steadily becoming more like our
modern English. The dialectical differences become less acute; the
inflections begin to drop away; the vocabulary gradually absorbs a
larger romance element, and the prosody drops from the forms of the
West Saxon period into measures and modes that reflect a living
connexion with the contemporary poetry of France. Thus, even in the
literature of a not too literary age, we find abundant tokens of that
strenuous national life which was manifesting itself in so many
different ways.

Art rather than literature reflected the deeper currents of the
thirteenth century. Architecture, the great art of the middle age, was
in its perfection. The inchoate gothic which the Cistercians brought
from Burgundy to the Yorkshire dales, and William of Sens transplanted
from his birthplace to Canterbury, was superseded by the more developed
art of St. Hugh's choir at Lincoln. In the next generation the new
style, imported from northern France, struck out ways of its own, less
soaring, less rigidly logical, yet of unequalled grace and
picturesqueness, such as we see in Salisbury cathedral, which
altogether dates from the reign of Henry III. Here also, as in
literature, foreign models stood side by side with native products.
Henry III.'s favourite foundation at Westminster reproduced on English
soil the towering loftiness, the vaulted roofs, the short choir, and
the ring of apsidal chapels, of the great French minsters. This was
even more em