The character of the Norman was in all times enterprising, wandering, cunning, and selfish; that of the Breton, or Armorican, savage, ferocious, daring, and implacable; but imaginative in the highest degree, as well as superstitious. The Provençal was light, avaricious, keen, active, and sensual; the Frank, bold, hardy, persevering, but vain, insolent, and thoughtless.[605] Distinctive character lies more generally in men's faults than their virtues; and thus, all these different races possessed the same higher qualities in common. They were brave to a prodigy; energetic, talented, enthusiastic; but during the eleventh, and the beginning of the twelfth centuries, the rude state of society in which Chivalry had arisen, continued to affect it still. The first crusade, however, gave an impulse to all those countries that joined in it, which tended infinitely to civilize Europe, by uniting nations and tribes, which had long been separated by different interests, in one great enterprise, wherein community of object, and community of danger, necessarily harmonized many previously discordant feelings, and did away many old animosities, by the strong power of mutual assistance and mutual endeavour. The babel of languages which Fulcher describes in the Christian camp before long began to form itself into two more general tongues. Latin, notwithstanding all the support it received in the court, in the church, and in the schools, was soon confined to the cloister; and the _langue d'oc_, or Provençal, became the common language of all the provinces on the southern side of the Loire, while the _langue d'oil_ only was spoken in the north of France. The manners and habits of the people, too, were gradually shaded into each other; the distinctions became less defined: the Provençal no longer looked upon the Breton as a savage; and the Frank no longer classed the Provençal with the ape. A thousand alliances were formed between individuals of different tribes, and the hand of kindred smoothed away the remaining asperities of national prejudice. Such assimilations tend of course to calm and mollify the mind of man; so that the general character of the country became of a less rude and ferocious nature. At this time, too, sprang up that greatest of all the softeners of the human heart, poetry; and immense was the change it wrought in the manners and deportment of that class which constituted the society of the twelfth century. The poetry of that age bore as distinct and clear a stamp of the epoch to which it belonged, as any that the world ever produced; and it is absurd to trace to an earlier day the origin of a kind of poesy which was founded upon Chivalry alone, and reflected nothing but the objects of a chivalrous society.