With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes
straight from the Latin. The influence of the pre-Roman Celts is almost
imperceptible; while the number of words introduced by the Frankish
conquerors amounts to no more than a few hundreds. Thus the French
tongue presents a curious contrast to that of England. With us, the
Saxon invaders obliterated nearly every trace of the Roman occupation;
but though their language triumphed at first, it was eventually affected
in the profoundest way by Latin influences; and the result has been that
English literature bears in all its phases the imprint of a double
origin. French literature, on the other hand, is absolutely homogeneous.
How far this is an advantage or the reverse it would be difficult to
say; but the important fact for the English reader to notice is that
this great difference does exist between the French language and his
own. The complex origin of the English tongue has enabled English
writers to obtain those effects of diversity, of contrast, of
imaginative strangeness, which have played such a dominating part in our
literature. The genius of the French language, descended from its single
Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction--in
simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.

Some of these qualities are already distinctly visible in the earliest
French works which have come down to us--the _Chansons de Geste_. These
poems consist of several groups or cycles of narrative verse, cast in
the epic mould. It is probable that they first came into existence in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and they continued to be produced in
various forms of repetition, rearrangement, and at last degradation,
throughout the Middle Ages. Originally they were not written, but
recited. Their authors were the wandering minstrels, who found, in the
crowds collected together at the great fairs and places of pilgrimage of
those early days, an audience for long narratives of romance and