rn controversies. The name Romance is itself a memorial of the
conquest of Europe by the Romans. They imposed their language on half
Europe, and profoundly influenced the other half. The dialectical,
provincial Latin, of various kinds, spoken by the conquered peoples,
became the Romance speech; and Romance literature was the new literature
which grew up among these peoples from the ninth century onwards,--or
from an earlier time, if the fringe of Celtic peoples, who kept their
language but felt the full influence of Christianity, be taken into the
account. The chief thing to be noted concerning Romance literature is
that it was a Christian literature, finding its background and
inspiration in the ideas to which the Christian Church gave currency.
While Rome spread her conquests over Europe, at the very heart of her
empire Christianity took root, and by slow process transformed that
empire. During the Middle Ages the Bishops of Rome sat in the seat of
the Roman Emperors. This startling change possessed Gibbon's
imagination, and is the theme of his great work. But the whole of
Gibbon's history was anticipated and condensed by Hobbes in a single
sentence--"If a man considers the original of this great ecclesiastical
dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the
ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave
thereof. For so did the Papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of
that heathen power."

Here, then, is the answer to a question which at once suggests itself.
How do we get this famous opposition between the older Latin literature
and the literature of those countries which had inherited or accepted the
Latin tradition? Why did not the Romans hand over their literature and
teach it, as they handed over and taught their law? They did teach it in
their schools; grammar and rhetoric, two of the chief subjects of a
liberal education, were purely literary studies, based on the work of the
literary masters of Rome. Never was there an education so completely
literary as the organized education of Rome and of her provinces. How
came it that there was any breach between the old and the new?

A question of this kind, involving centuries of history, does not admit
of a perfectly simple answer. It may be very reasonably maintained that
in Rome education killed literature. A carefully organized, universal
system of education, which takes for its material the work of gr