332 On Oc and Oyl. dales) as those who use oc, as he designates the Itahans who say si by their mountains, the Apennines, which begin in the territory of Genoa. But what might create some surprize, is the clause he adds concerning the French pro- perly so called (the people who affirm with oyl) : et mon- tihus AragonicB terminati ; so that he does not, as is usually the case, assign the whole of Southern France, but only its eastern half, to the language of oc. This however is in some respects really more accurate ; the oc language belonged principally to the coast of the Mediterranean. Whether, as is most probable, it spread from Provence and crossed the Pyrenees, or, as patriotic Spaniards insist, tra- velled from Catalonia into France ; — at all events its prin- cipal seat was always on this coast : in Provence, Langue- doc, thence turning aside to Gascony, and only a little higher in the Limosin ; further in Barcelona or Catalonia, the ad- jacent kingdom of Aragon, which was long united with Cata- lonia, moreover Valencia, as far as Murcia ; and also in the islands Minorca, Majorca, Ivica, and even Sardinia. These are the countries in which this language flourished, and for the most part still subsists. Now Dante is perfectly right, in not extending this language of oc in the south of France westward as far as the Atlantic ; for there, in Navarre and a part of Aquitaine, an entirely different language prevailed — the Bask. But whether he confounded this with the French (the oyl)^ since he extends this last as far as the mountains of Aragon, or whether a strip of the oyl really ran down between the Bask and the oc into Spain, I do not venture to decide. It is true that in any case he has not noticed the Bask, any more than the Bas-Breton in the north- west of France ; but then the subject of his treatise was no other than the languages of oc^ oyl^ and si; though, as a man of vigorous mind and original genius, he at the same time took a higher point of view for a general survey of the principal European languages, which however do not include tongues confined to so narrow a compass as the Bask, and the ancient British. We now proceed to consider two important remarks of Dante on the literature of the abovementioned three lan- guages, since it is on account of their literature that languages
