A SUBJECT. ANNA COMNENA, ETC. 'HYSMINIAS AND
HYSMINE.' ITS STYLE. ITS STORY. ITS HANDLING. ITS
"DECADENCE." LATENESS OF ITALIAN. THE "SARACEN" THEORY. THE
"FOLK-SONG" THEORY. CIULLO D'ALCAMO. HEAVY DEBT TO FRANCE.
YET FORM AND SPIRIT BOTH ORIGINAL. LOVE-LYRIC IN DIFFERENT
EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. POSITION OF SPANISH. CATALAN-PROVENCAL.
GALICIAN-PORTUGUESE. CASTILIAN. BALLADS? THE 'POEMA DEL
CID.' A SPANISH "CHANSON DE GESTE." IN SCHEME AND SPIRIT.
DIFFICULTIES OF ITS PROSODY. BALLAD-METRE THEORY.
IRREGULARITY OF LINE. OTHER POEMS. APOLLONIUS AND MARY OF
EGYPT. BERCEO. ALFONSO EL SABIO.

[Sidenote: _Limitations of this chapter._]

There is something more than a freak, or a mere geographical
adaptation, in taking together, and at the last, the contributions of
the three peninsulas which form the extreme south of Europe. For in
the present scheme they form, as it were, but an appendix to the
present book. The dying literature of Greece--if indeed it be not more
proper to describe this phase of Byzantine writing as ghostly rather
than moribund--presents at most but one point of interest, and that
rather a _Frage_, a thesis, than a solid literary contribution. The
literature of Italy prior to the fourteenth century is such a daughter
of Provencal on the one hand, and is so much more appropriately to be
taken in connection with Dante than by itself on the other, that it
can claim admission only to be, as it were, "laid on the table." And
that of Spain, though full of attraction, had also but just begun, and
yields but one certain work of really high importance, the _Poema del
Cid_, for serious comment in our pages. In the case of Spain, and
still more in that of Italy, the scanty honour apparently paid here
will be amply made up in other volumes of the series. As much can
hardly be said of Greece. Conscientious chroniclers of books may,
indeed, up to the sixteenth century find something which, though
scarcely literature, is at any rate written matter. And at the very
last there is the attempt, rather respectable than successful, to
re-create at once the language and the literature, for the use of
Greeks who are at least questionably Hellenic, in relation to forms
and subjects separated by more than a millennium--by nearly two
millennia--from the forms and the subjects in regard to which Greek
was once a living speech. But Greek literature, the living literary
contribution of G