ase to elaborate a syntax
equally suitable for verse and prose, for exposition and narrative,
for oratory and for argument. Moreover it was, as I have at least
endeavoured to show, probably England which provided the groundwork
and first literary treatment, it was certainly England that provided
the subject, of the largest, the most enduring, the most varied single
division of mediaeval work; while the Isle of Britain furnished at
least its quota to the general literature of Europe other than
vernacular.

Other countries, though their languages were not conquering their
conqueror as English was doing with French, also displayed sufficient
individuality in dealing with the models and the materials with which
French activity supplied them. The best poetical work of Icelandic,
like the best work of its cousin Anglo-Saxon, was indeed over before
the period began, and the best prose work was done before it ended,
the rapid and never fully explained exhaustion of Norse energy and
enterprise preventing the literature which had been produced from
having effect on other nations. The children of the _vates_ of Grettir
and Njal contented themselves, like others, with adapting French
romances, and, unlike others, they did not make this adaptation the
groundwork of new and original effort. But meanwhile they had made in
the Sagas, greater and lesser, such a contribution as no literature
has excelled in intensity and character, comparatively small as it is
in bulk and comparatively undistinguished in form.

"Unlike others," it has been said; for there can be no doubt that the
Charlemagne Cycle from Northern, the troubadour lyric from Southern,
France exercised upon Italy the same effect that was exercised in
Germany by the romances of Arthur and of Antiquity, and by the
_trouvere_ poetry generally. But in these two countries, as also more
doubtfully, but still with fair certainty, in Spain, the French models
found, as they did also in England, literary capacities and tastes not
jaded and outworn, but full of idiosyncrasy, and ready to develop each
in its own way. Here however, by that extraordinary law of
compensation which seems to be the most general law of the universe,
the effects differed as much in quantity and time as in character--a
remarkable efflorescence of literature in Germany being at once
produced, to relapse shortly into a long sterility, a tardier but more
constant growth following in England and Italy, while the e