lished Troubadour poetry, though there is scarcely another country of which the same can be said.

'Between the Spanish-Arabian poetry and the later Castilian alone is there any great affinity; and nothing is more widely removed from the French Troubadour, than the Castilian school, till about the fifteenth century, when it began to be imitative......... The earliest efforts of the Castilian poets are of an epic cast, abounding chiefly in military adventure, and consisting for the most part of detached scenes of the exploits of the Cid and other warriors. This seems the genuine early national school of Castilian poetry. It has no feature in common with the Provençal or Catalan Troubadours, and scarcely any affinity to the Oriental schools. Next come the ballads of chivalry founded on the French romances, which are probably none of them older than the latter part of the fourteenth century. Soon after commenced the era of the later Spanish romances, pastoral ballads, &c. so justly admired, and of the Trobador or Amatory school of Spain, which is to a great extent merely imitative of the later efforts of the Provençaux and Italians. Last in date are the ballads of the proper Moorish school, which belong to the age when the Spanish power was finally overwhelming the Moorish dynasty and entering on the seats of their luxury and ease: of these it has been said with truth, they "live like echoes about the ruins of Moorish greatness." pp. 37-45.

Yet, while we discard the notion of the Spanish-Arabian origin of the Provençal poetry and romance, we seem to have abundant evidence that they had their birth in that part of Spain, or rather Catalonia, and the adjacent provinces of France, bordering on the Mediterranean. The present Writer remarks, that, from the earliest days of Provençal glory, its court had enjoyed the most intimate union with that of Barcelona; and on the accession of Count Alfonso II. to the throne of Aragon, the empire of love and poetry' became extended over a considerable proportion of the western part of the peninsula. The Catalan is a genuine Romance tongue, more ancient than the Castilian, and bearing the closest affinity to the Limousin. Notwithstanding that the Provençal was used at the court, and many of the Spanish poets wrote in it, the Catalan Troubadours are represented to have been numerous, though few of their compositions have come down to us. But Pro vence appears to have been the nursery of the infant litera

ture.

The gay, smiling climate of the South of France,' remarks the present Writer, seemed to combine with the superiority and freedom of its political institutions to call forth the earliest fruits of chivalry and its attendant song. "In the middle age," says Papon, in his General History of Provence," there were more free persons in Provence than in any other province; and the revolutions in the

Per

monarchy having made themselves much less sensibly felt there, our towns were able to maintain their municipal administration. If the calamities of the times occasioned any interruption, they recovered themselves without any intervention on the part of the sovereign. As early as the beginning of the twelfth century, they were in possession of a form of government bearing a resemblance to that which had been given them by the Romans." During the greater part of the tenth century, while Northern France was a prey to intestine commotions, Provence and part of Burgundy and its dependencies had enjoyed repose under the mild rule of Conrad the Pacific. haps we may even look higher up, and trace the superior cultivation of some of the Southern states to the influence of the laws of the Burgundians, which certainly formed the most equitable and mild of the codes established on the basis of Roman jurisprudence. The courts of the Berengers, the sovereigns of Catalonia and part of Southern France, became the principal nurseries of the opening talent, and the centre of union with other European nations. period of their power embraces the whole bloom of Provençal literature, and their patronage of it every where stimulated the foreign courts with which they were connected to the cultivation of similar pursuits.' pp. 15, 16.

The

We thus seem to have established a close connexion between the first dawn of European literature and the existence of civil freedom and equal laws; and we must not forget, in this reference, that the birth-place of the Provençal Muses was the country of the Albigenses. The poets,' we are told, ⚫ were no friends to the Church of Rome,'-opposed to it alike through the love of letters and the love of liberty.

Many of the last efforts of Troubadour song were exerted in vindicating the rights of humanity against the cruelty and corruption of Rome and its retainers; and it is singular also, that some of the earliest remains of the poetry of this dialect, collected by M. Raynouard, are those of the heretic Vaudois or Waldenses.'

But how came these countries to be the first to receive the light of the morning which succeeded to the palpable night of Gothic barbarism? It has been usual to rank the Arabian settlements in Europe and the Crusades among the chief causes of the revival of learning. With regard to the latter, we endeavoured to shew, in our review of Mr. Mills's History of the Crusades*, that the hypothesis which ascribes a beneficial influence to those fanatical and savage expeditions, though sanctioned by some respectable writers, is altogether unfounded and erroneous; and that Gibbon has more justly appreciated their true character and consequences when he remarks, that

* Eclectic Review, Vol. XIII, p. 519, &c.

they checked, rather than forwarded, the maturity of Europe.' Mr. Berington's opinion, we apprehend, does not overstep the truth; namely, that they were utterly sterile with respect to the arts, to learning, and every moral advantage.' The representations of Warburton and Warton, that the holy wars were the means of introducing into the west, new and inexhaustible materials for poetry and romance, have been disproved by Ritson and Dunlop; and Mr. Mills has shewn that the opinion espoused by Mezerai, who is for deriving romance from the Crusades, is not only gratuitous, but involves an anachronism. The council of Clermont, by which the first crusade was decreed, was not held till November 1095; Jerusalem was not taken till 1099; long before which time that impulse had been communicated to society, of which the progress of the Albigenses and the rise of the Troubadours or Provençal school were the results. The earliest Provençal poem known to be extant, dates, we have seen, anterior to the year 1000; and the opinions of Berengarius had already spread very widely in Italy, Germany, France, and England, when the council of Tours was summoned in 1055. In thus connecting circumstances having apparently so little relation to each other as the spread of certain religious opinions and the formation of a poetical school and language, we shall not be understood as intimating that the heresy (so deemed) and the literature of the gay court of Provence had any affinity either in their character or as cause and effect; but we view them respectively as indications of that rising spirit of civil and religious freedom, which the Inquisition and the Crusade against the Albigenses were set on foot by the Holy Alliance of those days to extinguish. The question now before us is, How came Provence to be distinguished as the land of liberal institutions, the nursery

of freedom and letters?

'Massieu,' remarks the present Writer, imports the Arabic poetry, with Warton's fiction, by sea at Toulon and Marseilles; for he tells us, that, by the convenience of these 'ports, it passed with the commerce between Spain and France.' This importation of Arabian poetry, we have seen, is a mere reverie of the learned writer's. But Warton appears to us to have unconsciously approximated the true solution of the question, when he fixes on commerce as the real source of that influx, not of poetry and romance indeed, but of liberal ideas, productive industry, and wealth, to which the revival of learning must be ascribed. The shores of the Mediterranean still commanded and concentrated at that time the commercé of the world; and in the wake of commerce, Christianity, freedom, literature, and the arts, have uniformly followed. The

Italian republics derived their riches and their greatness from the commerce of the Levant; and to the same cause the maritime capitals of Provence and Catalonia owed their commercial and political greatness. Barcelona was recovered from the Moors by Louis the Debonair early in the ninth century. For seventy years after, it was governed by French viceroys; till at length, in 874, it was acknowledged as an independent earldom. From the earliest times, there appears to have been a close connexion between the Catalonian capital and Marseilles. In the former city, great numbers of Jews are said to have found shelter, bringing with them their well known habits of mercantile enterprise. Refugees and adventurers of all nations. would naturally be attracted to those free and populous cities, which held out at once religious toleration and encouragement to industry. The effect of commerce upon internal trade and manufactures needs not be pointed out. The manufactures of Barcelona were famous in the thirteenth century, and are probably more ancient, while those of Marseilles were equally, if not more considerable. It is remarkable, that the Cathari or Puritans, who began to attract attention early in the twelfth century, and whom there is good reason to identify with the Albigenses and Vaudois, are said to have been called in France Tisserands, Weavers, because numbers of them were of that occupation;-a singular coincidence, that the Protestants, the Hugonots of that day, should be distinguished by a name that recals the origin of our own silk-manufactures, for which we are indebted to the edict of Nantz! It is not, therefore, a mere hypothesis, but an historical fact, that the first buddings of literature after the dreary winter of the dark ages, the first kindlings of intellectual and moral life, took place in the immediate neighbourhood of those great maritime cities which furnished at once a vent and mart for the productions of industry, and an inlet to knowledge as well as to wealth and every humanizing influence.

The reciprocal connexion between productive industry, mercantile wealth, and civil and religious freedom, their active and re-active operation, and their influence in extending every species of useful knowledge, are illustrated by the whole course of modern history. Why then need we look any further for a solution of the problem which has so long employed the speculations of learned writers, respecting the revival of learning? To the Arabians and to the Christian monks, literature is deeply indebted for the preservation and transmission of the stores of Greek learning; but it would not be more absurd to ascribe its revival to the institution of monasteries, than to the Moorish conquest of Spain. And as litera

ture and civil liberty seemed to spring up at the same time, so they declined, and for the time appeared to perish together. The once brilliant school, and even the language of the South of France were consigned to oblivion by the bloody wars. against the Albigenses; and the southern provinces, stripped of their independence, were one by one annexed to the crown of France. The rising courts of Naples and Sicily became the resort of the votaries of the gay science, and the dialect of the Norman princes superseded that of Toulouse and Provence. In Germany, the iron reign of ecclesiastical power had the same blighting influence on the nascent literature. In Spain, the joint despotism of the monarchy and the Inquisition was established on the ruins of all that had formed the national greatness. In that ill-fated country, the experiment of intolerance has been fully tried, and the genuine effects of unmitigated Popery have been unequivocally displayed. Learning, commerce, manufactures, population, every thing has declined. The expulsion of the Moors, a measure as impolitic as it was iniquitous, gave a shock to the political system from which it has never recovered. A population of twenty millions was, within two centuries, reduced by misgovernment to less than a third of that number.* And the present frightful condition of this fine country presents an awful instance of that retributive justice, with which, even in this world, nations and communities are visited. The blood of the martyrs of the sixteenth century, the victims of the Inquisition, still cries out to heaven; and though that engine of priestly fury no longer exists, the infernal spells are not yet reversed, by which the execrable Dominick succeeded in enthralling the devoted nation.

From this revolting picture, it is pleasing to turn to the songs of emancipated Greece. And here, again, we may trace the same connexion between the stimulus supplied by commerce and the first movements of liberty, that we have pointed out in the case of the Italian Republics and the Provençal and Catalonian states, to which might have been added Holland, the Hanseatic republics, and England herself. Towards the latter end of the eighteenth century, Marseilles almost monopolized the commerce of the Levant. France was the only power in favour with the Divan; her consuls maintained throughout the dominions of the Porte

*At the close of the fourteenth century, the population of Spain is stated by several native writers to have amounted to nearly two and twenty millions. In 1688, it did not amount to twelve, and under Philip V. it had sunk to six millions.