456 ROMANCE LITERATURE 



the Jahrbuch fur romanische und englische Literatur. 1 The paper of 

 Edelstand du Me"ril on La vie et les oumages de Wace had the first 

 place in it. And French names were plentiful, nor was the Italian 

 and Spanish collaboration entirely lacking. Exhausted in strength 

 the Jahrbuch brought forth the vigorous Romania, and the Zeitschrift 

 fur romanische Philologie can also be called its posthumous daughter. 

 The foundation of the Romania marks in a certain way the Romance 

 emancipation from Germanic guardianship. And there certainly was 

 no need of a guardianship, where Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer, his 

 worthy competitor and comrade, were to be found. But this emanci- 

 pation did not prevent the continuation of harmony. And the 

 esteem in which Germany held her former ward is also shown by the 

 numbers who crossed the Rhine to listen eagerly to the spoken 

 word. In the first decades of the century for Uhland, Bekker, and 

 Diez, Paris was comprised in its libraries. Since 1870 the German 

 students have frequented the College de France and the Ecole des 

 Hautes Etudes no less than the Bibliotheque Nationale. 



The Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, imagined, coordinated, 

 and in no small extent also carried out by Gustave Grober, shows 

 how wonderfully and usefully productive the industriousness of 

 the period to which I wish to refer has been. This is an ency- 

 clopedia of which, a century ago, not a single chapter could 

 have been written. Together with literature it takes in languages 

 and other things too. Together with the middle age, the modern 

 age. But how much space our subject-matter occupies in it! There- 

 cognition for the literary order of those medieval rights that one had 

 long been compelled to recognize for civil and political history really 

 constitutes one of the characteristic features of the culture of the 

 nineteenth century. It is plain to all now that not even what follows 

 can be fully understood without going back to the sources. Likewise 

 it is now clear that we cannot judge of one region without considering 

 the others with which it has connections. Hence a privileged con- 

 dition for France, standing first in time and productiveness, and 

 against which we come up on every side. And by this, the single 

 histories of literature are changed; in the first place French literature. 

 Examine the one produced under the direction of Petit de Julleville, 

 or 1 he more succinct one of Suchier and Birch-Hirschfeld, and compare 

 it, lot us say, with the work of Xisard, which comes only a few decades 

 earlier, 2 and what a difference is scon, in some places more, in some 

 less distinctly (for much still remains to be done), for Spain and 



1 Already in 1846 L. Herrig and H. Viehhoff had begun to publish the Archiv 

 fur das Studium der neunrrn Sprarhen und Literaturen, still alive and prosperous. 

 But it was not their purpose to give special attention in it to Romance medieval 

 literature; nor is the scientific value of the Archiv in its ancient phases to be com- 

 pared with that of the Jahrbuch. 



2 The first of the four volumes of Nisard was published in 1845; the fourth in 

 1861. 



