It was an illiterate period, a fact expressed by Vico in the statement that languages again became "mute" or hieroglyphic. The common tongues, Italian, French, Spanish and German, were not written down: only a few ecclesiastics wrote a barbarous Latin, and hence "cleric" and "scholar" became synonymous terms; but among the very priests such ignorance prevailed that we find documents signed by bishops with the sign of the cross, as they were unable to write their own names. Owing to this paucity of learning an English law laid down that a man condemned to death should be reprieved if he could write, as a valuable craftsman; and "man of letters" as well as "cleric" or "clerk" remained a name for a learned man. Hence the value and general employment of family arms to indicate the owners of a house, a tomb, land or livestock, and the frequency with which coats-of-arms are found on buildings of the time. With barbarism returned the predominance of verse over prose. The prose of the Fathers of the Latin Church--and the same is true of those of the Greek--is full of poetic rhythms, so as to resemble a chant. The first modern lyric poetry was religious; and if there was not strictly a Christian religious poetry, this was because the subjects of our theology transcend all intelligence and imagination and crush the poetic faculty. Poetry and history were once more confounded; the romantic poets, the heroic poets of the return to barbarism, believed their own stories to be true, and thus Boiardo and Ariosto took as subject for their poems Turpin, Bishop of Paris. And just as the French language, when owing to the famous Parisian school and the highly subtle scholastic theology it passed at a stroke from spontaneity to reflection, preserved pure diphthongs in great number while adopting abstract terms, so the story of Turpin survived in France like a Homeric poem. These authors of Latin poems confined themselves entirely to history, for instance, William of Apulia's _De gestis Normannorum in Italia_ and Gunther's _Carmen heroicum de rebus a Frederico Barbarossa gestis._ The first writers in the vernacular were in Italy poets no less than in Provence and France. A punctilious virtue like that of Achilles again appeared, the complete morality of the duellist; hence arose the proud laws, the lofty duties and the vindictive satisfactions of the knight-errants sung by the romantic poets. Does not Cola di Rienzo seem to be a real Homeric character in his swift outburst of emotion when, as we read in his life, while speaking of the unhappy state of Rome he excited both himself and his listeners to unrestrained tears? Hyperbole was a common type of thought, as in children; for "I often remember," writes Vico, "when walking abroad that the gentle slopes which unfold themselves before my eyes appeared when I was a child to be steep and lofty mountains." Thus in the Middle Ages Roland and the other paladins were represented as gigantic in stature: and