REASONS FOR NOT NOTICING THE BULK OF MEDIAEVAL LATIN LITERATURE. EXCEPTED DIVISIONS. COMIC LATIN LITERATURE. EXAMPLES OF ITS VERBAL INFLUENCE. THE VALUE OF BURLESQUE. HYMNS. THE "DIES IRAE." THE RHYTHM OF BERNARD. LITERARY PERFECTION OF THE HYMNS. SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY. ITS INFLUENCE ON PHRASE AND METHOD. THE GREAT SCHOLASTICS. [Sidenote: _Reasons for not noticing the bulk of mediaeval Latin literature._] This series is intended to survey and illustrate the development of the vernacular literatures of mediaeval and Europe; and for that purpose it is unnecessary to busy ourselves with more than a part of the Latin writing which, in a steadily decreasing but--until the end of the last century--an always considerable proportion, served as the vehicle of literary expression. But with a part of it we are as necessarily concerned as we are necessarily compelled to decline the whole. For not only was Latin for centuries the universal means of communication between educated men of different languages, the medium through which such men received their education, the court-language, so to speak, of religion, and the vehicle of all the literature of knowledge which did not directly stoop to the comprehension of the unlearned; but it was indirectly as well as directly, unconsciously as well as consciously, a schoolmaster to bring the vernacular languages to literary accomplishment. They could not have helped imitating it, if they would; and they did not think of avoiding imitation of it, if they could. It modified, to a very large extent, their grammar; it influenced, to an extent almost impossible to overestimate, the prosody of their finished literature; it supplied their vocabulary; it furnished models for all their first conscious literary efforts of the more deliberate kind, and it conditioned those which were more or less spontaneous.