love of the marvellous, the deeper sensibility, the higher reverence for
womanhood, the characteristic spirit of sentiment and courtesy,--these
were the heir-looms of nature, which still regained the ascendant,
whenever the use of the living mother-language enabled the inspired poet
to appear instead of the toilsome scholar.

From this same union, in which the soul (if I may dare so express
myself) was Gothic, while the outward forms and a majority of the words
themselves, were the reliques of the Roman, arose the Romance, or
romantic language, in which the Troubadours or Love-singers of Provence
sang and wrote, and the different dialects of which have been modified
into the modern Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; while the language of
the Trouveurs, Trouveres, or Norman-French poets, forms the intermediate
link between the Romance or modified Roman, and the Teutonic, including
the Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and the upper and lower German, as being the
modified Gothic. And as the northernmost extreme of the Norman-French,
or that part of the link in which it formed on the Teutonic, we must
take the Norman-English minstrels and metrical romances, from the
greater predominance of the Anglo-Saxon Gothic in the derivation of the
words. I mean, that the language of the English metrical romance is less
romanized, and has fewer words, not originally of a northern origin,
than the same romances in the Norman-French; which is the more
striking, because the former were for the most part translated from the
latter; the authors of which seem to have eminently merited their name
of Trouveres, or inventors. Thus then we have a chain with two rings or
staples:--at the southern end there is the Roman, or Latin; at the
northern end the Keltic, Teutonic, or Gothic; and the links beginning
with the southern end, are the Romance, including the Provencal, the
Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, with their different dialects, then
the Norman-French, and lastly the English.