Note 177 — Chapter VIII

Of course this is only in comparison. For instance, in Dr Suchier's Denkmäler (Halle, 1883), which contains nearly 500 large pages of Provençal anecdota, about four-fifths is devotional matter of various kinds and in various forms, prose and verse. But such matter, which is common to all mediæval languages, is hardly literature at all, being usually translated, with scarcely any expense of literary originality, from the Latin, or each other.