ffect in
Spain was the most partial and obscure of all. The great names of
Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide hardly meet with
any others in these literatures representing writers who are known
abroad as well as at home. Only philologists out of England (and I
fear not too many besides philologists in it) read _Alisaunder_ and
_Richard Coeur de Lion_, _Arthour and Merlin_, or the _Brut_; the
early Italian poets shine but in the reflected light of Dante; and if
any one knows the Cid, it is usually from Corneille, or Herder, or
Southey, rather than from his own noble _Poem_. But no one who does
study these forgotten if not disdained ones, no one who with a love
for literature bestows even the most casual attention on them, can
fail to see their meaning and their promise, their merit and their
charm.

That languages of such power should have remained without literatures
is of course inconceivable; that any of them even needed the
instruction they received from France cannot be said positively; but
what is certain is that they all received it. In most cases the
acknowledgment is direct, express, not capable of being evaded or
misconstrued: in all it is incapable of being mistaken by those who
have eyes, and who have trained them. To inquire into the cause were
rather idle. The central position of France; the early notoriety and
vogue of the schools of Paris; the curious position of the language,
midway between the extremer Romance and the purely Teutonic tongues,
which made it a sort of natural interpreter between them; perhaps most
of all that inexplicable but undeniable formal talent of the French
for literature, which is as undeniable and as inexplicable as the less
formal genius of the English,--all these things, except the central
position, only push the problem farther back, and are in need of being
explained themselves. But the fact, the solid and certain fact,
remains. And so it is that the greater part of this book has
necessarily been occupied in expounding, first the different forms
which the lessons of France took, and then the different ways in which
other countries learnt those lessons and turned them to account.

It is thus difficult to overestimate the importance of that wonderful
literature which rises dominant among all these, imparting to all,
borrowing from none, or borrowing only subjects, exhibiting finish of
structure when all the rest were merely barbarian novices, exploring
eve