Romance

4026

Roman Law

and to their utmost. In the latest romances
of all, and in a few of the earlier, the 'con-
jurer's supernatural'—a blend of witch and
giant and so forth—is overdone quite ad
nauseam, and ends by debasing the poetical
to or below the level of the puerile.

Despite all this, we may assert for ro-
mance a very great place indeed in the liter-
ature of the world. Its great title is that it
added a new way of literary pleasure. The
peculiar charm of romance is not susceptible
of ultimate analysis: it ends, like all other
such things, in a mystery—in an appeal to
feeling.

' We have illustrated the characteristics of
romance chiefly from English examples, but
they are not very different either in the
French or in the German. The greatest known
writer of the accomplished romance itself is
Chretien de Troyes, in the later i2th century,
a poet to whom some would assign the main,
and to whom all must assign a large, part in
the development of the Arthurian story. The
Germans were particularly fortunate in pos-
sessing writers of very great talent, who de-
voted themselves to the task of naturalizing
the French romances — Gottfried of Strass-
burg, author of the most poetical version we
possess of the Tristram story; Hartman von
der Aue, author of the exquisite Der Arme
Heinrkh, which furnishes the subject of
Longfellow's Golden Legend; and above all
Wolfram von Eschenbach, one of the chief of
mediaeval poets, who worked out the mystical
side of the Grail legend in his poems of Par-
zzval and Titurel. Italy probably had not a
little early work of the chanson de geste
kind, though only the invaluable Poema del
Cid remains to us.

Romance Languages, the modern Euro-
pean languages derived from Latin, the
speech of the ancient Romans. They are de-
veloped from the ordinary colloquial Latin of
the middle ages. Not including local dialects,
the following are the Romance languages:
Italian, French, Provencal, Spanish, Portu-
guese, Roumanian, and Rhaeto-Romanic, or
Rumonsch. Provencal is the speech of Prov-
en$e, the southeastern part of France, known
to the Romans as the Provincia par excellence,
Apart from changes in the form of words, the
Romance languages differ from Latin mainly
in being much more analytic—in using auxil-
iary verbs instead of changes of form to sig-
nify variations of person, tense, mood, and
voice, and in using prepositions instead of
cases in nouns. They aH contain non-Latin

elements in their vocabulary in varying pro-
portions.

Roman Empire, Holy. See Holy Roman
Empire.

Roman Law. A body of law, sometimes
known as the Civil Law, developed by the
ancient Romans, Religious customs undoubt-
edly had a great influence in its origin and
early development. Probably the first syste-
matic codification of the secular laws of
Rome was the famous Law of the Twelve
Tables, about 450 B.C. Other codifications
were attempted, but the great works of
Justiiiian, about 529-534 **>•> including the

Roman Remains in England.

Upper, Uriconium, Wroxeter; Lower,

Gateway to Roman Camp, Borcovicus,

Northumberland.

Institutes, Digest or Pandects, and the Codex,
were the most authoritative, and the great
source of legal knowledge for centuries. The
Code Napoleon, a compilation of the Roman
law as developed in France, is the basis of the
Louisiana Code, and of the codes of most of
the South American states.