result, if only a partial one, of such attempts has been the
opposition between Classical precision and proportion and the Romantic
vague; but no one would hold this out as a final or sufficient account
of the matter. It may, indeed, be noted that that peculiar blended
character which has been observed in the genesis of perhaps the
greatest and most characteristic bloom of the whole garden--the
Arthurian Legend--is to be found elsewhere also. The Greeks, if they
owed part of the intensity, had undoubtedly owed nearly all the gaps
and flaws of their production, as well as its extraordinarily
short-lived character, to their lack alike of instructors and of
fellow-pupils--to the defect in Comparison. Roman Literature, always
more or less _in statu pupillari_, had wanted the fellow-pupils, if
not the tutor. But the national divisions of mediaeval Europe--saved
from individual isolation by the great bond of the Church, saved from
mutual lack of understanding by the other great bond of the Latin
_quasi_-vernacular, shaken together by wars holy and profane, and
while each exhibiting the fresh characteristics of national infancy,
none of them case-hardened into national insularity--enjoyed a unique
opportunity, an opportunity never likely to be again presented, of
producing a literature common in essential characteristic, but richly
coloured and fancifully shaded in each division by the genius of race
and soil. And this literature was developed in the two centuries which
have been the subject of our survey. It is true that not all the
nations were equally contributors to the positive literary production
of the time. England was apparently paying a heavy penalty for her
unique early accomplishments, was making a large sacrifice for the
better things to come. Between 1100 and 1300 no single book that can
be called great was produced in the English tongue, and hardly any
single writer distinctly deserving the same adjective was an
Englishman. But how mighty were the compensations! The language itself
was undergoing a process of "inarching," of blending, crossing, which
left it the richest, both in positive vocabulary and in capacity for
increasing that vocabulary at need, of any European speech; the
possessor of a double prosody, quantitative and alliterative, which
secured it from the slightest chance of poetic poverty or
hide-boundness; relieved from the cumbrousness of synthetic accidence
to all but the smallest extent, and in c