At quid jubes, pusiole, Quare mandas, filiole, Carmen dulce me cantare Cum sim longe exul valde Intra mare, O cur jubes canere? Intra seems put for trans. The metre is rhymed trochaic; but that is consistent with antiquity. It is, however, more pleasing than most of the Latin verse of this period, and is more in the tone of the modern languages. As it is not at all a hackneyed passage, I have thought it worthy of quotation. |It is changed to a new language in eighth and ninth.| 29. But in the middle of the eighth century, we find the rustic language mentioned as distinct from Latin;[47] and in the council of Tours held in 813 it is ordered that homilies shall be explained to the people in their own tongue, whether rustic Roman or Frankish. In 842 we find the earliest written evidence of its existence, in the celebrated oaths taken by Louis of Germany and his brother Charles the Bald, as well as by their vassals, the former in Frankish or early German, the latter in their own current dialect. This, though with somewhat of a closer resemblance to Latin, is accounted by the best judges a specimen of the language spoken south of the Loire; afterwards variously called the Langue d’oc, Provençal, or Limousin, and essentially the same with the dialects of Catalonia and Valencia.[48] It is decidedly the opinion of M. Raynouard, as it was of earlier inquirers, that the general language of France in the ninth century was the southern dialect, rather than that of the north, to which we now give the exclusive name of French, and which they conceive to have deviated from it afterwards.[49] And he has employed great labour to prove, that, both in Spain and Italy, this language was generally spoken with hardly as much difference from that of France, as constitutes even a variation of dialect; the articles, pronouns, and auxiliaries being nearly identical; most probably not with so much difference as would render the native of one country by any means unintelligible in another.[50] [47] Acad. des. Inscript. xvii. 713.