of the fall and redemption of man.”—Coleridge’s “Literary Remains,” i. 180. Whatever were these “Milesian Tales,” they amused the Grecian sages in the earliest period of their history.
3 Ritson and Weber have elegantly printed some of the best English metrical romances. In France they have recently enriched literature with many of these manuscript romances. See “Gentleman’s Magazine,” Oct. 1839.
4 It is a curious fact, that in 1390 Sir James Douglas, of Dalkeith, the ancestor of the Earl of Morton, apparently valued them as about equal to the statutes of the realm; for he bequeathed in his will to his son, “Omnes libros meos tam Statutorum Regni Scocie quam Romancie.”—Laing’s “Early Metrical Tales,” Edinburgh, 1826.
5 A collection of these romances formed into three folio tomes in manuscript was enriched by seven hundred and forty-seven miniatures, avec les Initiales peintes en or et couleurs. 6093, Roxburgh Cat.
6 Cat. of the Duke de la Vallière, 4507. Strutt would have done as much for ourselves, but he worked in unrequited solitude with all the passion of the French amateur, but without his “best artists.”
7 This romance was composed about the year 1200; the present copy was made in 1338. There is also a splendid manuscript with rich and delicate illuminations of the ancient romance of Alexander in prose in the Brit. Mus., Bib. Reg. 15, E. 6.
8 Campbell’s “Essay on English Poetry.”
9 Our vernacular literature owes to the unremitting ardour of our laureate recent editions of “La Morte d’Arthur,” “Palmerin of England,” and a new translation from the Portuguese of “Amadis of Gaul.” For readers who are not antiquaries, and who may recoil from the prolixity of the ancient romances, there is a work of their species which may amply gratify their curiosity, and it is of easy acquisition. It is not an unskilful compilation from the romances of chivalry made by Richard Johnson, a noted bookwright in the reign of Elizabeth; it has passed through innumerable editions, and has at last taken its station in the popular library of our juvenile literature. I suspect that the style has been too often altered in the modern editions, which has injured its raciness. It is well known as “The Renowned History of the Seven Champions of Christendom.” The compiler has metamorphosed the Rowland, Oliver, Guy, Bevis, &c., into seven saints or champions of Christendom; but “he has preserved some of the most capital fictions of the old Arabian romance.”—Warton, iii. 63, Ed. 8vo. It may serve as a substitute for the old black-letter romances, being a compendium of their rich or their grotesque fancies; or, as Ritson observes with his accustomed energetical criticism, “It is a compound of superstition, and, as it were, all the lyes in Christendom in one lye, and is in many parts of the country believed at this day to be as true as the gospel.”—“Dissertation on Romance,” xxxiv.
10 One of the most celebrated romantic histories is “the Troy-book of Guido delle Colonne,” which has been considered as the original of all the later tales of Troy. On the acute suggestion of Tyrwhit, Douce ascertained that this fabulous history, by many regarded as original, is only a Latin translation of a Norman poet,* which Guido passes off as a history collected from Dares and other fictitious authorities, but disingenuously conceals the name of Benoit de Saint Maur, whose works he appears to have found when he came to England. It was a prevalent practice in the middle ages to appropriate a work by a cautious suppression of any mention of the original. Tiraboschi might now be satisfied that Guido delle Colonne was in England, which he doubted, since he now stands charged with only turning into Latin prose the poem of a Norman, that is, an English poet at the court of our Henry the Second.
* Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakspeare.”
11 In the curious catalogue of these romances in the Roxburgh Library, the cataloguer announced three or four of these pretended authors as “names unknown to any literary historians,” and considered the announcement a literary discovery.
12 Père Menestrier, “Chevalerie Ancienne et Moderne,” chap. v. On Heralds.
13 See Bentham’s “History and Antiquities of Ely,” 27.
ORIGIN OF THE VERNACULAR LANGUAGES OF EUROPE.
The predominance of the Latin language, during many centuries, retarded the cultivation of the vernacular dialects of Europe. When the barbarous nations had triumphed over ancient Rome, the language of the Latins remained unconquered; that language had diffused itself with the universal dominion, and, living in the minds of men, required neither legions nor consuls to maintain its predominance.
From accident, and even from necessity, the swarming hordes, some of whom seem to have spoken a language which had never been written, and were a roving people at a period prior to historical record, had adopted that single colloquial idiom which their masters had conveyed to them, attracted, if not by its beauty, at least by its convenience. This vulgar Latin was not, indeed, the Latin of the great writers of antiquity; but in its corrupt state; freed from a complex construction, and even from grammar, had more easily lent itself to the jargon of the ruder people. Teutonic terms, or Celtic words with corrupt latinisms, were called “the scum of ancient eloquence, and the rust of vulgar barbarisms,” by an indignant critic in the middle of the fifth century.1 It was amid this confusion of races, of idioms, and of customs, that from this heterogeneous mass were hewed out those VERNACULAR DIALECTS of Europe which furnished each people with their own idiom, and which are now distinguished as the Modern Languages.
In this transference and transfusion of languages, Italy retained the sonorous termination of her paternal soil, and Spain did not forget the majesty of the Latin accent; lands favoured by more genial skies, and men blessed with more flexible organs. But the Gothic and the Northern races barbarously abbreviated or disfigured their Latin words—to sounds so new to them they gave their own rude inflections; there is but one organ to regulate the delicacy of orthoepy—a musical and a tutored ear. The Gaul,2 in cutting his words down, contracted a nasal sharpness; and the Northmen, in the shock of their hard, redundant consonants, lost the vowelly confluence.
This vulgar or corrupt Latin, mingled with this diversity of jargons, was the vitiated mother of the sister-languages of Europe—sisters still bearing their family likeness, of the same homely origin, but of various fortunes, till some attained to the beauty and affluence of their Latin line. From the first the people themselves had dignified their spurious generation of language as Romans, or Romance, or Romaunt, still proud perhaps of its Roman source; but the critical Latins themselves had distinguished it as Rustic, to indicate a base dialect used only by those who were far removed from the metropolis of the world.
But when these different nations had established their separate independence, this vernacular idiom was wholly left to the people; it was the image of their own barbaric condition, unworthy of the studies, and inadequate to the genius, of any writer. The universal language maintained its pre-eminence over the particular
