Of fierce Orlando’s high prowess,
Of Felixmarte’s knightliness
And the death of Olivier.[25]
[1] The moro latinado, or Spanish-speaking Moor, is a prominent figure in later Spanish story.
[2] Bishop Odoor’s will (747) shows the break-up of Hispanic Latin, and Charles the Bald in an edict of 844 alludes to the usitato vocabulo of the Spaniards—their “customary speech.” On the Gothic period see Père Jules Tailham, in the fourth volume of Cahier and Martin’s Nouveaux Mélanges d’Archéologie, d’Histoire, et de Littérature sur le Moyen Age (1877).
[3] This jargon owed much more to the lingua rustica than to Gothic, which has left its mark more deeply upon the pronunciation and syntax of Spanish than on its vocabulary.
[4] Catalan differed slightly in a dialectic sense from Provençal. It was divided into plá Catalá and Lemosé, the common speech and the literary tongue.
[5] “On the whole,” says Professor Saintsbury, “the ease, accomplishment, and, within certain strict limits, variety of the form, are more remarkable than any intensity or volume of passion or of thought” (Flourishing of Romance and Rise of Allegory, pp. 368–369). He further remarks that the Provençal rule “is a rule of ‘minor poetry,’ accomplished, scholarly, agreeable, but rarely rising out of minority.”