Título de la obra:
Introduction to the Literature of Europe, in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth centuries,
vol. 1
Poetry of France and Spain
The French versifiers had by this time, perhaps, become
less
numerous, though several names in the same style of
amatory
song
do some
credit
to their age. But the romances of
chivalry
began now to be written in prose; while a very celebrated poem,
the
Roman de la Rose,
had introduced an
unfortunate
taste for allegory into verse, from which France did not extricate herself for several generations. Meanwhile, the Provençal poets, who, down to the close of the thirteenth century, had flourished in the south, and whose language many Lombards adopted, came to an end; after the re-union of the fief of Toulouse to the crown, and the possession of Provence by a northern line of princes,
their
ancient and renowned tongue passed for a dialect, a patois of the people. It had never been much employed in prose, save in the kingdom of Aragon, where, under the name of Valencian, it continued for two centuries to be a legitimate language, till political circumstances of the same kind reduced it, as in southern France, to a provincial dialect. The Castilian language, which, though it has been traced higher in written fragments, may be considered to have
begun,
in a
literary
sense,
with
The Poem of the Cid,
not later than the middle of the twelfth century, was employed by a few extant poets in the next two ages, and in the fourteenth was as much the established vehicle of many kinds of literature in Spain as the French was on the other side of the mountains. The names of Portuguese poets not less early than any in Castile are recorded; fragments are mentioned by
Bouterwek
as old as the twelfth century, and there exists a collection of
lyric
poetry in the style of the Troubadours, part of the next age. Nothing has been published in the Castilian language of this amatory style older than 1400.