sympathy, and has performed her part in every age on the theatre of society, we discover the extraordinary fact that many ladies assumed the plumy helmet and dexterously managed the lance. The ladies rode amid armed knights resistless as themselves. It was subsequently, when we find that singularly fantastic institution of "The Courts of Love" which delivered their " Arrets" in the style of a most refined jurisprudence, that these beautiful companions at arms were satisfied to conquer the conquerors by more legitimate seductions, and that the Romances told of little but of loves. Ariosto and Tasso are supposed to have drawn their female warriors from the Amazonian Penthesilea and the Camilla of Homer and Virgil; but it would seem that the prototype of these feminine knights these poets also found among those old Romances which they loved.

It is unquestionable that these martial romances of chivalry, inflamed the restlessness of those numerous military adventurers who found an ample field for their chivalry after the crusades, in our continual incursions into France, of which country we were long a living plague, from the reign of Edward III. to that of Henry V., nearly a century of national tribulation. Many "a gentyl and noble esquyer," if perchance the English monarch held a truce with France or Scotland, flew into some foreign service. Sir Robert Knolles was known to the French as "le véritable démon de la guerre ;" and Sir John Hawkwood, when there was no fighting to be got at home, passed over into Italy, where he approved himself to be such a prodigy of "a man-at-arms" that the grateful Florentines raised his statue in their cathedral; this image of English valor may still be proudly viewed. This chivalric race of romance-readers were not, however, always of the purest" order of chivalry." If they were eager for enterprise, they were not less for its more prudental results. A castle or a ransom in France, a lordly marriage or a domain in Italy, were the lees that lie at the bottom of their glory.

We continued long in this mixed state of glory clouded

with barbarism; for at a time when literature and the fine arts were on the point of breaking out into the splendor of the pontificate of Leo the Tenth, in our own country, the great Duke of Buckingham, about 1500, held the old romance of "The Knight of the Swan" in the highest estimation, because the translator maintained that our duke was lineally descended from that hero; the first peer of the realm was proud of deriving his pedigree from a fabulous knight in a romantic genealogy.

But all the inventions and fashions of man have their date and their termination. For three centuries these ancient Romances, metrical or prose, had formed the reading of the few who read, and entranced the circle of eager listeners. The enchantment was on the wane; their admirers had become somewhat skeptical of "the true history" which had been so solemnly warranted; another taste in the more chastened writings of Roman and Grecian lore was now on the ascendant. One last effort was made in this decline of romantic literature, in that tesselated compilement where the mottled pieces drawn out of the French prose romances of chivalry were finely squared together by no unskilful workman, in Sir THOMAS MALORY, to the English lover of ancient romance well known by the title of La Morte d'Arthur. This last of these ancient romances was finished in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV., about 1470. CAXTON exulted to print this epical Romance; and at the same time he had the satisfaction of reproaching the "laggard" age. "What do ye now," exclaimed the ancient printer, "but go to the Bagnes, and play at dice? Leave this! leave it! and read these noble volumes." Volumes which not many years after, when a new system of affairs had occurred to supplant this long-idolized order of chivalry, ROGER ASCHAM plainly asserted only taught "open manslaughter and bold bawdry." Such was the final fate of Love and Arms!

ORIGIN OF THE VERNACULAR LANGUAGES OF EUROPE.

THE predominance of the Latin language, during many centuries, retarded the cultivation of the vernacular dialects of Europe. When the barbarous nations had triumphed over ancient Rome, the language of the Latins remained unconquered; that language had diffused itself with the universal dominion, and, living in the minds of men, required neither legions nor consuls to maintain its predomi

nance.

From accident, and even from necessity, the swarming hordes, some of whom seem to have spoken a language which had never been written, and were a roving people at a period prior to historical record, had adopted that single colloquial idiom which their masters had conveyed to them, attracted, if not by its beauty, at least by its convenience. This vulgar Latin was not, indeed, the Latin of the great writers of antiquity; but in its corrupt state, freed from a complex construction, and even from grammar, had more easily lent itself to the jargon of the ruder people. Teutonic terms, or Celtic words with corrupt Latinisms, were called" the scum of ancient eloquence, and the rust of vulgar barbarisms," by an indignant critic in the middle of the fifth century.* It was amid this confusion of races, of idioms, and of customs, that from this heterogeneous mass were hewed out those vernacular dialects of Europe which furnished each people with their own idiom, and which are now distinguished as the modern languages.

In this transference and transfusion of languages, Italy retained the sonorous termination of her paternal soil, and Spain did not forget the majesty of the Latin accent; lands favored by more genial skies, and men blessed with more

* Sidonius Apollinaris.

flexible organs. But the Gothic and the Northern races barbarously abbreviated or disfigured their Latin words; to sounds so new to them they gave their own rude inflections; there is but one organ to regulate the delicacy of orthoepy a musical and a tutored ear. The Gaul,* in cutting his words down, contracted a nasal sharpness; and the Northmen, in the shock of their hard, redundant consonants, lost the vowelly confluence.

This vulgar or corrupt Latin, mingled with this diversity of jargons, was the vitiated mother of the sister-languages of Europe; sisters still bearing their family likeness, of the same homely origin, but of various fortunes, till some attained to the beauty and affluence of their Latin line. From the first the people themselves had dignified their spurious generation of language as Romans, or Romance, or Romaunt, still proud perhaps of its Roman source; but the critical Latins themselves had distinguished it as Rustic, to indicate a base dialect, used only by those who were far removed from the metropolis of the world.

But when these different nations had established their separate independence, this vernacular idiom was wholly left to the people; it was the image of their own barbaric condition, unworthy the studies, and inadequate to the genius, of any writer. The universal language maintained its pre-eminence over the particular dialect, and as the course of human events succeeded, in the overwhelming

* An ingenious literary antiquary has given us a copious vocabulary, as complete evidence of Latin words merely abbreviated by omitting their terminations, whence originated those numerous monosyllables which empoverish the French language. In the following instances the Gauls only used the first syllable for the entire word, damnum-damn; aureum - or; malum-mal; nudum - nud; amicus — ami; vinum-vin; homo-hom, as anciently written; curtus court; sonus- son; bonus-bon; and thus many others. The nasal sound of our neighbors still prevails; thus Gracchus sinks into Gracque; Titus Livius is but Tite Live; and the historian of Alexander the Great, the dignified Quintius Curtius, is the ludicrous Quinte Curce! - Auguis, du Génie de la Langue Françoise.

of ancient Rome, another Rome shadowed the world. Ecclesiastical Rome, whence the novel faith of Christianity was now to emanate, far more potent than military Rome, perpetuated the ancient language. The clergy through the diversified realms of Europe were held together in strict conformity, and by a common bond chained to the throne of the priesthood one faith, one discipline, one language!

The Latin tongue, both in verse and prose, was domiciliated among people of the most opposite interests, customs, and characters. The primitive fathers, the later schoolmen, the monkish chroniclers, all alike composed in Latin; all legal instruments, even marriage-contracts, were drawn in Latin: and even the language of Christian prayer was that of abolished paganism.

The idiom of their father-land- or, as we have affectionately called it, our "mother-tongue," and as our ancient translator of the Polychronicon energetically terms it," the birth-tongue"- those first human accents which their infant ear had caught, and which from their boyhood were associated with the most tender and joyous recollections, every nation left to fluctuate on the lips of the populace, rude and neglected. Whenever a writer, proposing to inform the people on subjects which more nearly interested them, composed in the national idiom, it was a strong impulse only which could induce him thus to submit to degrade his genius. One of the French crusaders, a learned knight, was anxious that the nation should become acquainted with the great achievements of the deliverers of Jerusalem; it was the command of his bishop that induced him to compose the narrative in the vernacular idiom; but the twelve years which he bestowed on his chronicle were not considered by him as employed for his glory, for he avows that the humiliating style which he had used was the mortifying performance of a religious penance.

All who looked toward advancement in worldy affairs, and were of the higher orders in society, cultivated the lan