a more select occasion. The minstrels of northern and southern France divided the sentiments of chivalry between them. The valor and daring of the true cavalier were magnified by the Trouvère; while the amatory song of the Troubadour dwelt on the devotion of the knight to his lady-love. Petrarch stood in much the same relation to the lyric poetry of the south as Chaucer did to the epic verse of the north. Each form degenerated, though the degeneracy of erotic song is ever more fatal than that of heroic verse. The sentiment of love had, at best, in chivalry but an artificial and forced dévelopment, and was ready for an easy decline into lasciviousness. The courage and valor of chivalry were more simple, sincere, normal to the condition of society; and though liable to become hair-brained and extravagant in the exploits undertaken, yet retained some sound and wholesome quality. The romances deserve attention because of the influence they exerted on our Norman ancestry, and the social character of western Europe; because a first and chief literary service to which the early English was put was the reception, and circulation, in prose and metrical form, of these narratives, as translated from the French; and because the character of English poetry has all along been affected by them, and that too strongly in its later periods. The chief subjects of these romances were Arthur and his knights, Charlemagne and his followers. Later were added warriors of the Crusades, and Grecian heroes. The story of Arthur and his knights of the round table offers a good illustration of the growth of poetic fiction, its steady enlargement, the transmission of its resources, the currency and increasing interest it gives to its inventions. As chivalry was an institution of rigid and overstrained sentiments, this, its literary side, was very requisite to it, both as expressing and enforcing its views of character, as stimulating and rewarding its heroes. The minstrel was essential to the knightly pageant, as giving body, form and circulation to those finespun sentiments of life, of love, and of loyalty; making them felt and operative in the rough, lawless impulses of the age. Without the minstrel to rehearse, in hours of leisure and festivity, warlike achievements; and make positive, frequent and pungent their stimulus, chivalry could scarcely have gained or retained the influence it exerted. It is not surprising that the minstrel became a sort of sacred character with claims of ingress and entertainment everywhere. The minstrel put the experience and exploits of the knight in their most transfigured and poetic form, and rehearsed them to his flattered and delighted senses. He became to the knight his idealizing spirit, holding before him a magic mirror, in which his deeds found the liveliest and most fascinating reflection. The knight thus learned how nobly he acted, how tenderly he felt, and with what enchantment he was invested. When these romances became more extravagant, and were, moreover, in the decay of chivalry, increasingly divorced from the actual temper and wants of men, it was a most serviceable task which Cervantes undertook in Don Quixote, that of turn ing into ridicule the notion of knight errantry. We shall scarcely understand the value and success of this work, except as we see in it a last blow given to a proud and mischievous sentiment lingering beyond its time. The Normans, famous cavaliers, haughty and irritable, had embodied their social feelings in this Romance literature, and could scarcely unite themselves to a new language and nationality without a transfer of these, their favorite literary recreations. Thus the fourteenth century beheld a large reproduction in English of these works, so essential to an adventurous and chivalrous gentry. Thus were they able to wont themselves to their new home with a reduced sense of loss. We have now spoken of the essential constituents of literature, urging two points, that the æsthetical impulse, or the element of form, is predominant in literature, and the more so as long periods are taken into consideration; and that a controlling force, giving character to the literary effort of any period, is found in the ethical nature. This is the light which imparts depth and coloring to our spiritual heavens, and, negatively or positively, determines the tone of the passing hour. We have spoken of the sluggish strength of the Saxons, the flexible enterprise of the Normans, slowly uniting to form English character on a type of unrivalled, patient, practical and aspiring sagacity. We then passed to the foreign influences at work in England in the fourteenth century, the initiative period of its literature. In common with western Europe, the germs which began to reclothe the earth, when the flood of barbaric invasion had passed by, and the sedimentary deposit had become fixed, were found in Christianity, modified and sustained by Latin civilization. The classical influence on popular literature showed itself chiefly in a fund of stories, wrought and rewrought by the minstrelsy of different nations. Italy, as at the very centre of these civilizing forces, yielded the earliest growth, and became a source of art and literary cultivation to the Western nations. A third force felt in England was the native Norman poetry, indigenous to the times, peculiarly vigorous, and closely connected with their chivalrous character and customs. Such were the more remote fountains that fed the streams of English thought. We shall next turn to those which at home more directly and copiously maintained it. Many are the forces, near at hand and afar off, that are at work in national character and national life. If the future lies an open field before us, we march to take possession of it with our flocks and herds and household stuff. The good and the evil travel on together, and renew their conflict at each successive stage. We have sketched the leading conditions under which the English nation, newly compacted in its elements, occupied the fourteenth century, and made ready to work out the national history. As this evolves itself, we shall see the old taking up the new, and the new uniting itself to the old, with the organic freedom of forces, that hold within themselves their own law of life. religion LECTURE II. Home Influences affecting English Literature in the Fourteenth We have now to speak of those home or domestic influences which in England gathered about and helped to shape the literature of the fourteenth century. They drop into four classes; religious or ethical forces, social forces, language, and the directions or divisions of literature. These lie like concentric circles around the germanient points of growth, each succeeding one approaching more nearly, and affecting more definitely, the literary product of the time; yet falling off in the scope and breadth of its influence. The outer, or ethical circle, when it fails to determine the immediate form and spirit of a production, constitutes none the less the atmosphere, the climate, under which it grows up, and thus decides the vigor of its life. Ethical influences so pervade our national life, that, positively or negatively, they set limits to all that is said or done in it. Like the rarity or density of the air, they settle the flight that is open to a given stroke of wing, how high it shall bear the spirit upward. In the fourteenth century, religion inter-penetrated society, visibly touching and modifying it at |