But, even if we had room, it would profit us little to busy ourselves with diplomatic Latin or with the Latin of chronicles, with the Latin of such scientific treatises as were written or with the Latin of theology. All these except, for obvious reasons, the first, tended away from Latin into the vernaculars as time went on, and were but of lesser literary moment, even while they continued to be written in Latin. Nor in _belles lettres_ proper were such serious performances as continued to be written well into our period of capital importance. Such a book, for instance, as the well-known _Trojan War_ of Joseph of Exeter,[2] though it really deserves much of the praise which it used to receive,[3] can never be anything much better than a large prize poem, such as those which still receive and sometimes deserve the medals and the gift-books of schools and universities. Every now and then a man of irrepressible literary talent, having no vernacular or no public in the vernacular ready to his hand, will write in Latin a book like the _De Nugis Curialium_,[4] which is good literature though bad Latin. But on the whole it is a fatal law of such things that the better the Latin the worse must the literature be. [Footnote 2: Included with Dictys and Dares in a volume of Valpy's Delphin Classics.] [Footnote 3: Cf. Warton, _History of English Poetry_. Ed. Hazlitt, i. 226-292.] [Footnote 4: Gualteri Mapes, _De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones Quinque_. Ed. T. Wright: Camden Society, 1850.] [Sidenote: _Excepted divisions._] We may, however, with advantage select three divisions of the Latin literature of our section of the Middle Ages, which have in all cases no small literary importance and interest, and in some not a little literary achievement. And these are the comic and burlesque Latin writings, especially in verse; the Hymns; and the great body of philosophical writing which goes by the general title of Scholastic Philosophy, and which was at its palmiest time in the later portion of our own special period. [Sidenote: _Comic Latin literature._]