langue d'oc; the Northern French, or Romance Walloon, langue d'oïl; and the Italian, langue de si.

But the langue de si, as well as her two sisters, was, from the first, split into a hundred dialects of infinite variety; and, notwithstanding the efforts of their literature, the Italians, by a blind, municipal infatuation, still cling to those vernacular forms, to the great detriment of their beautiful language. These differences naturally arose from the remnants of the various races that settled in separate districts, and formed, as it were, as many different colonies, where their characteristic idioms were preserved, until, in the wars of the republics, all alliance and friendly intercourse having ceased, each town remained isolated, and their dialectic peculiarities were cherished with all the warmth of their political jealousies. Hence the Italian patois vary at the distance of only ten miles, and the idioms and accent of one town are either utterly unintelligible, or are an object of wonder and ridicule, to its immediate neighbours. All such differences, however, may be classified into seven principal branches, and, according to their ethnological derivation, the Italian dialects may be reduced to the Lombard, Venetian, Genoese, Tuscan, Roman, Neapolitan, and Sicilian. The Lombard dialect, with all its various branches, the Piedmontese, Milanese, Romagnolo, &c., is characterized by harshness of accent, and energy and rapidity of expression. It is evidently of barbaric origin; it sounds more unlike Italian than either Provençal or Spanish, and its diphthongs and contractions cannot be expressed with the twenty-two letters of the Italian alphabet. Venice, always safe and pure from foreign mixture, and Rome, where the native race was never utterly destroyed, have preserved all the softness and roundness of the Latin; while the dialects of Apulia and Calabria bear some evident alloy of Greek, and something of the Moorish sound is still preserved in the deep and guttural accent of the islanders.

It was long, however, before the Italian, or any of the new languages, was employed to any literary purpose; and the rude attempts at a revival of learning, that took place after the first encouragement given by Charlemagne, were made in a corrupted language, which they still called, and fancied to be, Latin.

The opening of universities in France, England, and Italy re-awakened an ardor that seemed irreparably extinguished. All that remained of ancient learning, buried in the soli

tude of the cloisters, was assembled in the new seminaries of Paris and Oxford, and in the much more ancient schools of Salerno and Bologna. That of Salerno, enlightened by the Arabians of Sicily and Africa, and protected by the Normans and Swabians successively ruling over the country, made the greatest progress in medicine and in all other physical sciences. Bologna, the mother of all universities, dating its origin from Charlemagne, or according to others from Theodosius, in the fifth century, equally the favorite of popes and emperors, had already, before the peace of Constance, attained the highest degree of splendor. Towards the end of the eleventh century, Irnerius, a native of that city, taught there the Pandects of Justinian, recently discovered at Pisa or Amalfi; and Bologna acquired beyond dispute the first rank in Europe as a law school. But similar institutions simultaneously rose in other cities of Lombardy and Tuscany, all modelled after the example of Bologna, where Irnerius had first introduced the titles and insignia of doctor and bachelor, such as they have since been adopted by all the universities in the world. The study of law, so consistent with the interests and rights of men, then a general subject of debate in the Italian republics, absorbed all talents; and for a long while the Italians abandoned to the Parisian doctors their meagre dialectics and dusky theology. The podestà and gonfalonieri, the first magistrates in these municipal governments, were now taken by preference from the universities, and a civil administration was gradually substituted for a military rule. Thus, when the great national contest had been decided, and the Italian cities sent their legates to treat as equals with Frederic Barbarossa, for the peace of Constance, it was not without an undefinable emotion, that the iron-clad barons of the German court beheld a few dark-eyed, long-robed Italian doctors, the disciples of Irnerius, advancing among them with a confident mien, as if announcing that the iron age was at an end, and arms were now destined to give place to the gown!

But darkness could not give way without a long, desperate struggle. The prejudices and superstitions of a barbarous age, the spirit of pedantry and the love of controversy, an overwrought sophistry, and a constant proneness jurare in verba magistri, for a long time wrapped up, and entangled, and eclipsed all truth. Thus divinity soon degenerated into

heresy and blasphemy; astronomy was confounded with astrology, medicine with sorcery, and chemistry with the arcana of alchemy. Men of science, erecting themselves into a privileged class, by the prestige of a dead language, of long flowing robes, and a mysterious air, secluded themselves from the people, and were looked upon with wonder and awe, not unmixed with distrust and contempt. Their ambition for a universal scholarship, when the relations between the different branches of learning were more imperfectly defined, and the means of acquisition were less within reach, engaged them in a labyrinth of disorderly pursuits, where they were exhausted and lost before coming to any profitable results. Science was to them an unfathomable ocean, of which they vainly strove to sound the depths, while their object should have been only to sail across it.

It would be difficult to divine what their zeal for abstruse studies would have led them to, had not an impulse of a totally opposite nature fortunately called the general attention to a new light arising from extraneous sources. The Arabi

ans, by nature a warlike and enthusiastic nation, used from immemorial time to associate religion with poetry, having, according to their Oriental style, taken the four opposite corners of the wind, and spread over the earth with a valor whose report was sufficient to insure success, - having conquered more enemies than they could count, and subdued more lands than they could explore, now turned their minds to the arts of peace. Brought into contact with the Greeks by their conquest of Egypt, they possessed themselves of the treasures of Grecian learning; and, under the dynasty especially of the Abassides, they opened schools and libraries throughout their monarchies of Asia, Africa, and Spain. They translated ancient Greek manuscripts, placed Greek scholars at the head of their literary establishments, and, giving themselves up principally to physical and mathematical studies, established, by their important discoveries, the highest claims to the gratitude of Europe. Still poetry formed their greatest delight, and it reached its highest splendor in Spain under the dynasty of the Ommiades. Disdaining the sober and pure inspirations of the Greeks, whom they had revered as masters in philosophical pursuits, the Arabians followed no guide in their poetical effusions but the glow of their Eastern imagination. Hence their poetry preserved its

original colors; that delicacy and luxuriancy of sentiment, that bewildering intoxication and mysticism of love, that dreamy phantasmagory, and, above all, that kind of Oriental transcendentalism, which was afterwards communicated to the Provençals, and constitutes the essential difference between the ancient and modern, between the classical and romantic styles. The Arabians had probably no epic or dramatic poetry; they had love poems and elegies, satires and didactic pieces, and, more lately, the fairy tales and golden_dreams, known under the name of "Arabian Nights' Entertainments.' This vast collection, of which only the six-and-thirtieth part, according to Sismondi, has been translated in Europe, is now the only kind of literature existing in the East; and forms still the delight of all coffee-houses and caravanseries, where those tales are daily recited to the dejected Mussulman, who seeks to forget, in the charms of fiction, the melancholy feelings of the present moment.

Sicily did not, perhaps, obtain from the Saracenic invasion all the advantages in respect to literary institutions, that were derived by Spain from the Moors. The Saracens of Sicily found no rest in their adopted home. Their continual piratical excursions allowed them no leisure for study. Still the medical school at Salerno would never have risen to so eminent a rank without the direction of African and Arabian scholars. The Saracens, who were spared in the Norman conquest, and flourished at the court of Frederic the Second and Manfred his son, considerably added to the renown that Sicily enjoyed in the infancy of Italian literature.

Meanwhile France, ruled by feudal and monarchical governments, had sunk into a state of almost absolute ignorance. The universities of Paris and Montpellier had lost much of their primitive splendor, and the Latin language was almost utterly extinct. The disuse of this tongue had a natural tendency to ennoble the vulgar Romance dialects, as it introduced them equally among the highest and most cultivated classes. This happened when the dominion of the Moors in Spain gave signs of impending dissolution. They broke into factions and feuds. They departed from their wonted moderation and wisdom. They banished the few Christians, who, from immemorial time, had found a peaceful residence among them. These revolutions drove to the Christian courts of Catalonia and Aragon a number of illustrious exiles, who car

ried with them their arts and science, and the tales and songs of the East. By the union of Catalonia and Provence, in 1092, their poetry passed from Spain to the court of Provence. That court enjoyed in those times a long peace, and was the rendezvous of all the chivalry of Europe. Tournaments and courts of love were there constantly held; that newborn poetry was welcomed with a wonderful enthusiasm, and it gave rise to what was called the "gay science" of the Troubadours.

The long wars of Alphonso the Second, of Castile, against the Moors of Toledo, the crusades, the acquisition of a part of Languedoc by the English, and other general political commotions, having associated the knights of all Europe in common adventures, the poetry of Provence soon became the inheritance of all Christendom. The differences between the dialects of Spain, Provence, Italy, and Northern France, were not so wide then as in our days. The Romance Provençal became the language of chivalry; and the courts of Germany, of Flanders, of England, and Sicily received the Provençal troubadours with the same honors and regard they enjoyed at home. No classical lore being required for the cultivation of the gay science, no mythological or historical allusion being ever mingled with those simple and spontaneous productions, the consequence was, that ignorant barons and monarchs could cultivate minstrelsy, without losing in study that time which was claimed by their warlike exercises. Thus, some talent for poetry was considered as one of the indispensable attributes of chivalrous prowess; and the profession of troubadour was honored by the names of Frederic Barbarossa, Richard of England, and other grave and wise monarchs, who aspired to the title of adepts in the gay science, as they sighed after the glory of private knights in the field. Social and domestic life seemed animated by the air of those songs. It was a blessed age of roving and pilgrimages, of wooing and worshipping, of dancing and skirmishing, of sinning and confessing. Romance in life closely followed upon romance in poetry. Comical and tragical adventures supplied the poet with inexhaustible materials. It was now a king, imprisoned in a dark tower, and his faithful minstrel travelling in search of him, across mountains and along rivers, the sound of his harp reaching the ears of the monarch, like a ray of hope in the darkness of his lonely confinement; now a damsel, pining under the tyranny of a