The positive achievements of English literature, during the period with which this volume deals, are not at first sight great; and all the more finished literary production of the time, till the extreme end of it, was in French and Latin. But the work done during this time in getting the English language ready for its future duties, in equipping it with grammar and prosody, in preparing, so to speak, for Chaucer, is not only of the first importance intrinsically, but has a value which is almost unique in general literary history as an example. Nowhere else have we the opportunity of seeing a language and a literature in the process of gestation, or at least of a reformation so great as to be almost equal to new birth. Of the stages which turned Latin through the Romanic vulgar tongues into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Provencal, French, we have the very scantiest remains; and though the Strasburg oaths and the Eulalia hymn are no doubt inestimable in their way, they supply exceedingly minute and precarious stepping-stones by which to cross from Ausonius to the _Chanson de Roland_. From the earliest literary stages of the Teutonic tongues we have, except in the case of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic, very little wreckage of time; and Anglo-Saxon at least presents the puzzling characteristic that its earliest remains are, _coeteris paribus_, nearly as complete and developed as the earliest remains of Greek. In German itself, whether High or Low, the change from oldest to youngest is nothing like the change from the English of _Beowulf_ to the English of Browning. And though the same process of primordial change as that which we have seen in English took place certainly in German, and possibly in the Romance tongues, it is nowhere traceable with anything like the same clearness or with such gradual development. By the eleventh century at latest in France, by the end of the twelfth in Germany, verse had taken, in the first case fully, in the second almost fully, a modern form. In England it was, during the two hundred years from 1150 to 1350, working itself steadily, and with ample examples, from pure accent to accentual quantity, and from alliteration to rhyme. Of this process, and those similar to it in other countries, we shall give an account which will serve for the whole in the latter part of this chapter; the actual production and gradual transformation of English language and literature generally may occupy us in the earlier part.