30. Thus, in the eighth and ninth centuries, if not before, France had acquired a language unquestionably nothing else than a corruption of Latin, (for the Celtic or Teutonic words that entered into it were by no means numerous, and did not influence its structure), but become so distinct from its parent, through modes of pronunciation as well as grammatical changes, that it requires some degree of practice to trace the derivation of words in many instances. It might be expected that we should be able to adduce, or at least prove to have existed, a series of monuments in this new form of speech. It might naturally appear that poetry, the voice of the soul, would have been heard wherever the joys and sufferings, the hopes and cares of humanity, wherever the countenance of nature, or the manners of social life, supplied their boundless treasures to its choice; and among untutored nations it has been rarely silent. Of the existence of verse, however, in this early period of the new languages, we find scarce any testimony, a doubtful passage in a Latin poem of the ninth century excepted,[51] till we come to a production on the captivity of Boethius, versified chiefly from passages in his Consolation, which M. Raynouard, though somewhat wishing to assign a higher date, places about the year 1000. This is printed by him from a manuscript formerly in the famous abbey of Fleury, or St. Benoit-sur-Loire, and now in the public library of Orleans. It is a fragment of 250 lines, written in stanzas of six, seven, or a greater number of verses of ten syllables, sometimes deviating to eleven or twelve; and all the lines in each stanza rhyming masculinely with each other. It is certainly by much the earliest specimen of French verse;[52] even if it should only belong, as Le Bœuf thought, to the eleventh century. [51] In a Latin eclogue quoted by Paschasius Radbert (ob. 865) in the life of St. Adalhard, abbot of Corbie (ob. 826), the romance poets are called upon to join the Latins in the following lines: “Rustica concelebret Romana Latinaque lingua, Saxo, qui, pariter plangens, pro carmine dicat; Vertite huc cuncti, cecinit quam maximus ille, Et tumulum facite, et tumulo superaddite carmen.” Raynouard, Choix des Poésies, vol. ii. p. cxxxv. These lines are scarcely intelligible; but the quotation from Virgil, in the ninth century, perhaps deserves remark, though, in one of Charlemagne’s monasteries, it is not by any means astonishing. Nennius, a Welsh monk of the same age, who can hardly write Latin at all, has quoted another line; “Purpurea intexti tollant aulæa a Britanni;” which is more extraordinary, and almost leads us to suspect an interpolation, unless he took it from Bede. Gale, xv. Scriptores, iii. 102. [52] Raynouard, vol. ii. pp. 5, 6, and preface, p. cxxvii. |Provençal grammar.|