After accurately distinguishing these three principal idioms of the Romance, which formed the early spoken and written language of the Peninsula,[12] it will be more readily perceived why the Catalonian and Limosin poetry could not maintain itself in competition with the Spanish and Portuguese, which were of more recent growth, and why the poetry of Spain and that of Portugal have, from their first rise, preserved nearly the same character and passed through the same periods of splendour and decay. The Catalonian poetry was, from its origin, inseparably united with the language of the Troubadours, throughout its territories, from the Italian to the Castilian frontiers. While the _Cours d’Amour_, the festal meetings, and various other gallant exhibitions prevailed, in which the GAYA CIENCIA, or Joyous Art, of these bards of love and chivalry flourished, and in which the bards themselves bore a brilliant part as masters of the ceremonies, the language and the poetry gave reciprocal importance to each other. When, however, the romantic spirit had exhausted itself in these modes, when another sort of gallantry came into vogue, and finally, when a more cultivated style of poetry, entirely new to Spain, was introduced from Italy, and propagated with the Castilian language, the poets of Catalonia, Arragon, and Valencia began to write verses in the new manner, and to disown their mother tongue in their compositions. This literary phenomenon, which has its epoch only in the sixteenth century, cannot be attributed to political dependence alone; for hitherto the ancient national poetry of the Castilians had continued foreign to the inhabitants of the Arragonian provinces, individual imitators excepted, even after these provinces were united with the Castiles. But when the Arragonese, in their zeal to vie with the Castilians in the reform of their ancient poetry, began to write verses in the Castilian language, their success was facilitated by the relationship which had long subsisted between the old Provençal poetry, the sister of the Limosin, and the Italian, which in the sixteenth century became the model of the Spanish and Portuguese.[13]