Once more I return to the early poetry of France, with which our own poetry, in its origins, is indissolubly connected.  In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that seed-time of all modern language and literature, the poetry of France had a clear predominance in Europe.  Of the two divisions of that poetry, its productions in the langue d’oil and its productions in the langue d’oc, the poetry of the langue d’oc,[88] of southern France, of the troubadours, is of importance because of its effect on Italian literature;—­the first literature of modern Europe to strike the true and grand note, and to bring forth, as in Dante and Petrarch it brought forth, classics.  But the predominance of French poetry in Europe, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is due to its poetry of the langue d’oil, the poetry of northern France and of the tongue which is now the French language.  In the twelfth century the bloom of this romance-poetry was earlier and stronger in England, at the court of our Anglo-Norman kings, than in France itself.  But it was a bloom of French poetry; and as our native poetry formed itself, it formed itself out of this.  The romance-poems which took possession of the heart and imagination of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are French; “they are,” as Southey justly says, “the pride of French literature, nor have we anything which can be placed in competition with them.”  Themes were supplied from all quarters:  but the romance-setting which was common to them all, and which gained the ear of Europe, was French.  This constituted for the French poetry, literature, and language, at the height of the Middle Age, an unchallenged predominance.  The Italian Brunetto Latini,[89] the master of Dante, wrote his Treasure in French because, he says, “la parleure en est plus delitable et plus commune a toutes gens.”  In the same century, the thirteenth, the French romance-writer, Christian of Troyes,[90] formulates the claims, in chivalry and letters, of France, his native country, as follows:—­

  “Or vous ert par ce livre apris,
  Que Gresse ot de chevalerie
  Le premier los et de clergie;
  Puis vint chevalerie a Rome,
  Et de la clergie la some,
  Qui ore est en France venue. 
  Diex doinst qu’ele i soit retenue
  Et que li lius li abelisse
  Tant que de France n’isse
  L’onor qui s’i est arestee!”

“Now by this book you will learn that first Greece had the renown for chivalry and letters:  then chivalry and the primacy in letters passed to Rome, and now it is come to France.  God grant it may be kept there; and that the place may please it so well, that the honor which has come to make stay in France may never depart thence!”

Yet it is now all gone, this French romance-poetry, of which the weight of substance and the power of style are not unfairly represented by this extract from Christian of Troyes.  Only by means of the historic estimate can we persuade ourselves now to think that any of it is of poetical importance.