oduced
nothing worthy to take up the tradition of the Sagas and the Poems. It
influenced (till the late and purely literary revival of it biassed to
some extent the beginnings of the later Romantic revival in Western
Europe, a hundred and fifty years ago) nothing and nobody. It was as
isolated as its own island. To Provencal, on the other hand, though
its own actual producing-time was about as brief, belongs the
schooling, to no small extent, of the whole literature of Europe.
Directly, it taught the _trouveres_ of Northern France and the poets
of Spain and Italy prosody, and a certain amount of poetical style and
tone; indirectly, or directly through France, it influenced England
and Germany. It started, indeed, none of the greater poetical kinds
except lyric, and lyric is the true _grass_ of Parnassus--it springs
up naturally everywhere; but it started the form of all, or at least
was the first to adapt from Latin a prosody suitable to all.

The most obvious, though not the least interesting, points of
likeness in unlikeness have been left to the last. The contrasts
between the hawthorn and nightingale of Provence, her "winds heavy
with the rose," and the grey firths, the ice- and foam-fretted
skerries of Iceland; between the remains of Roman luxury pushed to
more than Roman effeminacy in the one, and the rough Germanic virtue
exasperated to sheer ferocity in the other,--are almost too glaring
for anything but a schoolboy's or a rhetorician's essay. Yet they are
reproduced with an incredible--a "copy-book"--fidelity in the
literatures. The insistence of experts and enthusiasts on the
law-abiding character of the sagas has naturally met with some
surprise from readers of these endless private wars, and burnings, and
"heath-slayings," these feuds where blood flows like water, to be
compensated by fines as regular as a water-rate, these methodical
assassinations, in which it is not in the least discreditable to
heroes to mob heroes as brave as themselves to death by numbers, in
which nobody dreams of measuring swords, or avoiding vantage of any
kind. Yet the enthusiastic experts are not wrong. Whatever outrages
the Icelander may commit, he always has the law--an eccentric,
unmodern, conventional law, but a real and recognised one--before his
eyes, and respects it in principle, however much he may sometimes
violate it in practice. To the Provencal, on the other hand, law, as
such, is a nuisance. He will violate it, so to