teries in England, till the introduction of the mendicant orders about 1230, belonged to the Benedictine order, or some branch of it, and the devotion of the Benedictines to learning is well known. Among the houses especially distinguished for the learned men whom they produced were St. Albans, Malmesbury, Canterbury, and Peterborough. Besides the original works composed by monks at this period, we are indebted to their systematic diligence for the preservation of the ancient authors. Every large monastery had its scriptorium, in which manuscripts were kept, and the business of transcribing was regularly carried on by monks appointed for the purpose. Paper.-Among literary helps, few have a more practically powerful influence on the circulation and stimulation of ideas than a plentiful supply of writing material. Literature was grievously hampered up to nearly the end of our period owing to the costliness and scarcity of paper. For the first seven centuries after the Christian era, the material generally used was the papyrus, imported from Egypt. But after the conquest of Egypt by the Mahomedans, towards the end of the seventh century, this importation ceased. The place of the papyrus was now supplied by parchment, in itself a much better and more durable material, but so costly that the practice became common of erasing the writing on an old parchment, in order to make room for a new work. A manuscript thus treated was called a palimpsest. When the characters had become much faded through lapse of time, the same motive-scarcity of material-led to the practice of writing a new work across the old one without resorting to erasure. A manuscript so dealt with was called a codex rescriptus. But since, in manuscripts of the first kind, the process of erasure was often imperfectly performed, and in those of the second, the old faded letters can often, with a little trouble, be distinguished beneath the newer ones, it has happened that valuable copies, or fragments of ancient works, have in both these ways been recovered.' Paper made from linen or cotton rags is an Arabian invention; and the first paper, nearly resembling that which we now use, was made at Mecca in the year 706. The knowledge of the art soon passed into Spain, and by the Moors was communicated to the Christians. But it was not till towards the close of the thirteenth century that paper mills were established in the Christian states of Spain, whence, in the following century, the art passed into Italy, and became generally diffused. Poetry:-Latin Poems; French Poetry; Troubadours; Trouvères. It may be stated broadly, that from the eleventh to the thirteenth century inclusive, the prose literature of Europe came from churchmen, the poetry from laymen. But in one direction the churchmen made incursions into the domain of their rivals without fear of competition or reprisals. We refer to the Latin poetry of the Middle Ages. Much of this owed its existence to a spirited but hopeléss endeavour-one which even Erasmus was disposed to repeat a hundred and fifty years later-to make the Latin the universal language of literature. All the existing vernacular tongues-though some were more advanced than otherswere not to be compared in respect of regularity and euphony to the Latin; and the poets of the cloister preferred to write elegant hexameters and elegiacs after the model of their beloved Virgil and Ovid rather than engage in a struggle with the difficulties of their native speech in its then condition of fluidity and rapid change. One The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, at Paris, a manuscript of the Greek Testament of the highest value, written over with a work of St. Ephrem, is a case in point. concession they did make to the fashion of their own age, when, forsaking the classic metres, they sought for that measured melody which is the essential form of poetry in the Arabic-or possibly Celtic-invention of rhyme, by this time (1100) completely naturalised in the south of Europe. These Latin rhymes were called Leonine verses.' The solemn hymns of the Church-some of which are unsurpassed even as literary compositions-were composed in these rhyming measures; among their authors were St. Anselm, St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Pope Innocent III. The majority of these were written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. No Latin poems of this elevated class were composed by English ecclesiastics, but leonine verse was largely used in this country as a vehicle for satire and humour. There is among the publications of the Camden Society a thick volume of such Latin poems, the authorship of which was long ascribed, though upon the authority of no MS. of earlier date than the fourteenth century, to Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford, the friend of Giraldus de Barri, and the composer of several of the great prose romances concerning Arthur, who flourished towards the end of the twelfth century. But Mr. Wright doubts whether Map had really any hand in them; he thinks that they were probably written at different periods from the latter half of the twelfth century to the middle of the thirteenth ;' and that they emanated from, and circulated amongst, university men, to whom attacks on Church abuses were always welcome, till Laud in the seventeenth century drew closer the ties which bound university and Church together. 6 The term seems to have been originally applied only to rhymed hexameters or elegiacs, and afterwards to have been extended to any Latin rhymed poems. The name comes from the inventor, Leoninus or Leonine, a monk of Marseilles, who flourished about 1135. See Warton, vol. i. p. cl. n. 2 Edited by Mr. Wright in 1841. Most of them pass under the name of Bishop Golias,' an imaginary personage representing episcopal and clerical vice and irregularity, and also a satirist of the same. The Apocalypsis Golia is a general onslaught on the shortcomings of the clergy; it maintained its popularity down to the time of the Reformation. The Confessio Golia is the poem out of which a few stanzas were extracted to form the famous drinking-song-so called-beginning Meum est propositum in tabernâ mori, on the strength of which Walter Map obtained the sobriquet of 'The jovial Archdeacon,' the fact being, even assuming him to be the author of it, that the poem is ironical and satirical throughout. In a third poem, Golias in Romanam Curiam, occurs the following ludicrous account of the effect on a well-filled purse of the transaction of business at the papal court : Des istis, das aliis, addis dona datis, Et cum satis dederis, quærunt ultra satis; Quid irem per singula? Colligam summatim: But the strict Latinists scouted the idea of any such concessions to a corrupt modern taste as were implied in the practice of rhyming; when they wrote poetry, they used the metres as well as the language of the Latin poets. Thus Geoffrey de Vinesauf, who has been already mentioned among the historians, wrote a Latin poem, entitled De Nova Poetriâ, and addressed to Innocent III., the intention of which was to recommend and illustrate the legitimate mode of versification in opposition to the leonine or barbarous species. Actuated by the same prepossessions, Josephus Iscanus, a monk of Exeter, who flourished about the year 1210, wrote a long poem in Latin hexameters, entitled De bello Trojano, which, to judge of it from the extracts printed by Warton, must have possessed great literary merit. Though now for gotten, it enjoyed so great a popularity, even as late as the fifteenth century, as to be thumbed by school-boys in every grammar-school, and ranked by teachers side by side with the genuine poets of Rome. But this fanatical preference of a dead language, even as the medium for poetry, could not in the nature of things hold its ground. In poetry, the originality of the thought, the vigour and aptness of the expression, are what constitutes the charm: we read it, not that we may learn about things, but that we may come in contact with thoughts. But no one can think with perfect freedom except in his native tongue, nor express himself with remarkable degrees of force and fire, unless upon subjects coming closely home to his feelings. To an ecclesiastic, whose home is the church, the church's language might perhaps be considered in one sense as his natural speech, so long as his thoughts are busied with religious objects. Thus no poem more startlingly real, more tender, more awe-inspiring, exists in any language, than the wonderful sequence 'Dies iræ, dies illa.' But for the themes of love, or war, or gaiety, with which poetry is principally conversant, the Latin could not be so apt a medium as the roughest of the vernacular tongues, since to the ear accustomed to the vivid and expressive utterances on these subjects to which the converse of daily life of necessity gives rise, its phrases must always have seemed cold, flat, and indirect. Hence as the Trouvères and their imitators rise and multiply, the school of Latin poetry dwindles away, and after the middle of the thirteenth century nearly disappears. The poetry which, strong in its truth to nature, supplanted its more polished rival, was the growth of France; and to trace its origin, and analyse its many developments, |