st crusade, and though their language
has been materially altered, there seems no doubt that they were
originally compiled in French.[870] Besides some charters, there are
said to have been prose romances before the year 1200.[871] Early in the
next age Ville Hardouin, seneschal of Campagne, recorded the capture of
Constantinople in the fourth crusade, an expedition, the glory and
reward of which he had personally shared, and, as every original work
of prior date has either perished or is of small importance, may be
deemed the father of French prose. The Establishments of St. Louis, and
the law treatise of Beaumanoir, fill up the interval of the thirteenth
century, and before its conclusion we must suppose the excellent memoirs
of Joinville to have been composed, since they are dedicated to Louis X.
in 1315, when the author could hardly be less than ninety years of age.
Without prosecuting any further the history of French literature, I will
only mention the translations of Livy and Sallust, made in the reign and
by the order of John, with those of Caesar, Suetonius, Ovid, and parts of
Cicero, which are, due to his successor Charles V.[872]

[Sidenote: Spanish language.]

I confess myself wholly uninformed as to the original formation of the
Spanish language, and as to the epoch of its separation into the two
principal dialects of Castile and Portugal, or Gallicia;[873] nor should
I perhaps have alluded to the literature of that peninsula, were it not
for a remarkable poem which shines out among the minor lights of those
times. This is a metrical life of the Cid Ruy Diaz, written in a
barbarous style and with the rudest inequality of measure, but with a
truly Homeric warmth and vivacity of delineation. It is much to be
regretted that the author's name has perished; but its date has been
referred by some to the middle of the twelfth century, while the hero's
actions were yet recent, and before the taste of Spain had been
corrupted by the Provencal troubadours, whose extremely different manner
would, if it did not pervert the poet's genius, at least have impeded
his popularity. A very competent judge has pronounced the poem of the
Cid to be "decidedly and beyond comparison the finest in the Spanish
language." It is at least superior to any that was written in Europe
before the appearance of Dante.[874]

[Sidenote: Early writers in the Italian.]

A strange obscurity envelops the infancy of the Italian language. Though