There is something more than a freak, or a mere geographical adaptation, in taking together, and at the last, the contributions of the three peninsulas which form the extreme south of Europe. For in the present scheme they form, as it were, but an appendix to the present book. The dying literature of Greece--if indeed it be not more proper to describe this phase of Byzantine writing as ghostly rather than moribund--presents at most but one point of interest, and that rather a _Frage_, a thesis, than a solid literary contribution. The literature of Italy prior to the fourteenth century is such a daughter of Provencal on the one hand, and is so much more appropriately to be taken in connection with Dante than by itself on the other, that it can claim admission only to be, as it were, "laid on the table." And that of Spain, though full of attraction, had also but just begun, and yields but one certain work of really high importance, the _Poema del Cid_, for serious comment in our pages. In the case of Spain, and still more in that of Italy, the scanty honour apparently paid here will be amply made up in other volumes of the series. As much can hardly be said of Greece. Conscientious chroniclers of books may, indeed, up to the sixteenth century find something which, though scarcely literature, is at any rate written matter. And at the very last there is the attempt, rather respectable than successful, to re-create at once the language and the literature, for the use of Greeks who are at least questionably Hellenic, in relation to forms and subjects separated by more than a millennium--by nearly two millennia--from the forms and the subjects in regard to which Greek was once a living speech. But Greek literature, the living literary contribution of Greek to Europe, almost ceases with the latest poets of the Anthology. [Sidenote: _Late Greek romance._]