Q 34 0?i Oc and Oyl. by the brothers Grimm 5 and to the Nibelungen, though we only possess this immortal work in secondary forms. 2) Dante (de vzdg, eloqii. lib. i. cap. 10) briefly and happily distin- guishes the qualities of the literatures of oc, and of oyl^ which afterwards became the subject of a controversy, which excited almost as much zeal and jealousy as the rival literary preten- sions of northern and southern Germany. The great Floren- tine, who was well acquainted with France, partly through his teacher Brunetto Latini, who resided there long, and even wrote an important work in French, and partly by personal inspection, calls the language of oc the elder and sweeter for poetry, that of oyl on the other hand the more polished and elegant for prose : this last, he says, possesses the Bible and the histories of Troy and Rome, and the beautiful chivalrous tales of king Arthur. It is nearly in the same way that Le Grand d'Aussy extols northern France on account of the more varied subjects of its poetry : whereas southern France, according to him, can produce nothing but monotonous love- songs, and for instance, no tales and histories. Millot, pro- voked by this reproach, brings forward some pretty Provencal stories. On the whole however Dante'^s observation is pro- bably correct, though neither of the contending parties seem to have been acquainted with it : the greater luxuriance of nature has perhaps a tendency to inspire occasional strains and short tender lays, which however charming, and masterly in their form, weary in the end, and this narrowness of range may have been the cause of the early extinction of the Pro- vencal poetry. To proceed : Dante speaks fully enough of the lingua oc^ but means nothing by it but the language itself. He has no name, such as Languedoc, for the country. On the other hand it is notorious that it was usual to say lingua^ langue^ for people or nation : and it was a very easy transition to use the same word for the land of the people which spoke the language. Still it is probable that there are not many ex- amples of a country's being described by a word or expression of the language spoken in it. It is quite another thing when Dante uses Imgua doco^ lingua di si^ shortly to designate the languages which contain those particles. But he does not say the land of si for Italy, the district of sipn for Bologna.
