Of those who borrowed from them, the Germans, as we should expect, lean rather to the Northern type, but vary it with touches of purity, and other touches of religion; the Italians to the Southern, exalting it into a mysticism which can hardly be called devotional, though it at times wears the garb of devotion.[192] Among those collections for which the student of letters pines, not the least desirable would be a _corpus_ of the lyric poets of Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We should then see--after a fashion difficult if not impossible in the sporadic study of texts edited piecemeal, and often overlaid with comment not of the purely literary kind--at once the general similarity and the local or individual exceptions, the filiation of form, the diffusion of spirit. No division of literature, perhaps, would serve better as a kind of chrestomathy for illustrating the positions on which the scheme of this series is based. And though it is overshadowed by the achievements of its own pupils; though it has a double portion of the mediaeval defect of "school"-work--of the almost tedious similarity of different men's manner--the Italian poetry, which is practically the Italian literature, of the thirteenth century would be not the least interesting part of such a _corpus_. [Footnote 192: "Sacro erotismo," "baccanale cristiano," are phrases of Professor d'Andrea's.] [Sidenote: _Position of Spanish._] The Spanish literature[193] with which we have to do is probably inferior in bulk even to that of Italy; it is certainly far less rich in named and more or less known authors, while it is a mere drop as compared with the Dead Sea of Byzantine writing. But by virtue of at least one really great composition, the famous _Poema del Cid_, it ranks higher than either of these groups in sheer literary estimation, while from the point of view of literary history it is perhaps more interesting than the Italian, and certainly far more interesting than the Greek. It does not rank with French as an instance of real literary preponderance and chieftainship; or with German as an example of the sudden if short blossoming of a particular period and dialect into great if not wholly original literary prominence; much less with Icelandic and Provencal, as containing a "smooth and round" expression of certain definite characteristics of literature and life once for all embodied. It has to give way not merely to Provencal, but to Italian itself as an example of early scholarship in literary form. But it makes a most interesting pair to English as an instance of vigorous and genuine national literary development; while, if it is inferior to English, as showing that fatal departmental or provincial separation, that "particularism" which has in many ways been so disastrous to the Peninsula, it once more, by virtue of the _Poema_, far excels our own production of the period in positive achievement,