e exactness the peculiar and native character of French literature at
its origin. It is a far cry from the middle ages to the time of Louis
XIV.; but the splendors of the most lovely days do not efface the charm
belonging to the glimmerings of dawn.

The first amongst the literary creations of the middle ages is that of
the French language itself. When we pass from the ninth to the
thirteenth century, from the oath of Charles the Bald and Louis the
Germanic at Strasbourg, in 842, to the account of the conquest of
Constantinople in 1203, given by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, seneschal of
Champagne, what a space has been traversed, what progress accomplished in
the language of France! It was, at first, nothing but a coarse and
irregular mixture of German and Latin, the former still in a barbarous
and the latter already in a corrupted state; and amidst this mixture
appear some fragments of the Celtic idioms of Gaul, without any literary
tradition to regulate this mass of incoherence and confusion. As for
following the development, regulation, and transformation of the French
national language during these three centuries, and marking how it issued
from this formless and vulgar chaos, there are not facts and documents
enough for our guidance throughout that long travail; but when the
thirteenth century begins, when Villehardouin tells the tale of the
crusade, which put, for seventy years, Constantinople and the Greek
empire of the East in the hands of the Latin and German warriors of the
West, the French language, though still rude and somewhat fluctuating,
appears already rich, varied, and capable of depicting with fidelity and
energy events, ideas, characters, and the passions of men. There we have
French prose and French poesy in their simple and lusty youth; the
_Conquest of Constantinople_ by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, and the _Song
of Roland_ by the unknown poet who collected and put together in the form
of an epopee the most heroic amongst the legends of the reign of
Charlemagne, are the first great and beautiful monuments of French
literature in the middle ages.

The words are French literature; and of that alone is there any intention
of speaking here. The middle ages had, up to the sixteenth century, a
Latin literature; philosophers, theologians, and chroniclers all wrote in
Latin. The philosophers and theologians have already been spoken of.
Amongst the chroniclers some deserve the name of historians; not on