I have dwelt on this less as a matter of personal explanation, which is generally superfluous to friends and never disarms foes, than in order to explain and illustrate the principle of the Series. All its volumes have been or will be allotted on the same principle--that of occasionally postponing or antedating detailed attention to the literary production of countries which were not at the moment of the first consequence, while giving greater prominence to those that were: but at the same time never losing sight of the _general_ literary drift of the whole of Europe during the whole period in each case. It is to guard against such loss of sight that the plan of committing each period to a single writer, instead of strapping together bundles of independent essays by specialists, has been adopted. For a survey of each time is what is aimed at, and a survey is not to be satisfactorily made but by one pair of eyes. As the individual study of different literatures deepens and widens, these surveys may be more and more difficult: they may have to be made more and more "by allowance." But they are also more and more useful, not to say more and more necessary, lest a deeper and wider ignorance should accompany the deeper and wider knowledge. The dangers of this ignorance will hardly be denied, and it would be invidious to produce examples of them from writings of the present day. But there can be nothing ungenerous in referring--_honoris_, not _invidiae causa_--to one of the very best literary histories of this or any century, Mr Ticknor's _Spanish Literature_. There was perhaps no man of his time who was more widely read, or who used his reading with a steadier industry and a better judgment, than Mr Ticknor. Yet the remarks on assonance, and on long mono-rhymed or single-assonanced tirades, in his note on Berceo (_History of Spanish Literature_, vol. i. p. 27), show almost entire ignorance of the whole prosody of the _chansons de geste_, which give such an indispensable light in reference to the subject, and which, even at the time of his first edition (1849), if not quite so well known as they are to-day, existed in print in fair numbers, and had been repeatedly handled by scholars. It is against such mishaps as this that we are here doing our best to supply a guard.[1] [Footnote 1: One of the most difficult points to decide concerned the allowance of notes, bibliographical or other. It seemed, on the whole, better not to overload such a Series as this with them; but an attempt has been made to supply the reader, who desires to carry his studies further, with references to the best editions of the principal texts and the best monographs on the subjects of the different chapters. I have scarcely in these notes mentioned a single book that I have not myself used; but I have not mentioned a tithe of those that I have used.] CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE FUNCTION OF LATIN.