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218 founded: only it is also pretty certain that, as they have been handed down, they have been modernized in diction, so that, in their present form, they represent to us the Welsh language of a time not much preceding the date of the oldest manuscripts, or of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. The later Welsh literature, as well as the Irish, is abundant in quantity. The Cornish, also, has a tolerably copious literature of not far from the same age; its earliest monument, a Latin-Cornish vocabulary, may be as old as the twelfth century. The language of Brittany, the Armorican—which is so closely allied with the two last-mentioned that it cannot well be regarded as a remnant and representative of the Celtic dialects of Gaul, but must rather belong to colonists or fugitives from Britain—is recorded in one or two brief works going back to the fourteenth century, or even farther.

We come next to the Romanic branch, as we have called it when briefly noticing its history at an earlier point in our discussions. Of the languages which compose it, and whose separate currents of linguistic tradition we trace backward until they converge and meet in the Latin, two, the Rhæto-Romanic in southern Switzerland and at the head of the Adriatic, and the Wallachian of the northern provinces of Turkey, have no literature of any antiquity or independent value. The other five—the Italian, French, Provençal, Spanish, and Portuguese—all emerged out of the condition of vulgar patois, and began to take on the character of national cultivated languages, at not far from the same time, or in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. There are fragments of French texts dating from the tenth century, but the early French literature, abundant and various, and, in its romances, attaining a wonderfully sudden and general popularity throughout cultivated Europe, belongs to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Provençal poetry, consisting of the songs of the troubadours, whose chief activity was displayed at the court of Toulouse, in southern-most France, was wholly lyrical in form, and amatory or satirical in content: it finished its brilliant but brief career, of about three hundred years, in the fourteenth century. The