Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/166

 Some parts of Cæsar's Commentaries, Suetonius, Florus, Eutropius, Justin, were, I think, directly known; I question whether Livy or Tacitus was; except so much as had filtered through the Historia Miscella, or the translations and additions to the Chronicon of Eusebius. Seneca certainly was read and utilised; there is indeed a manuscript of Seneca which contains on a fly-leaf a trace of having been at the English court about this very time. But John of Salisbury's acquaintance with Roman literature can only be estimated by a careful reading of the Polycraticus; but we must remember that what he could read was at least within the reach of his contemporaries.

I have not said much in these lectures about the vernacular writers of the reign, whether of the Norman or English race; for indeed they can hardly as yet be said to be literary people. But I must not finish without a word about them, lest I should be thought to undervalue them. The poem of Jordan Fantosme, on the rebellion of the sons of Henry in 1173 and 1 1 74; the poem on the Conquest of Ireland; the original French poem of Ambrose, on which the Gesta Ricardi are founded; the Life of S. Thomas of Canterbury, by Garnier of Pont S. Maxence; the valuable poetic chronicle of Benedict of S. Maur, are the beginnings of a new literature the value of which is prospective; predecessors of Villehardouin and Joinville and the Chronique d'Outremer, after the law, if there be such a law, that in the development of a vernacular literature poetry takes precedence of prose. I sometimes think that the growth of this school or schools of composition was owing to the increased interest taken by women in the history of their country; certainly the spread and strengthening of it tends to show that the classes to whom the use of Latin, except in the Church services, was becoming less and less familiar, were beginning to care to have a literature of their own. It shows, moreover, taken in connexion with that deadly liveliness of the Latin poetry which I have adverted to, that, whilst Latin was still a ready enough medium for serious writing, it was necessary to find something better and freer than Latin verse to interest people. Medieval Latin prose never dies out;