than it is to Spanish and Italian, and that those who spoke it applied the term "French to northern speech, calling their own Limousin, or Provençal, or Auvergnat. The limits where it prevailed extended far beyond Provence itself. Authorities differ with regard to the exact boundaries. It will suffice for the present purpose to take those Mr. Hueffer adopts-namely, the district within a boundary formed by a line drawn from the mouth of the Gironde to that of the Saone, in the north, while the southern limit includes parts of Spain, such as Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands.

Herr Karl Bartsch, the eminent historian of Provençal literature, divides it into three periods:-the first, to the end of the eleventh century; the second, which is the one that marks the most flourishing time of the poetry of the Troubadours, extending over the twelfth and thirteenth; and the third period—of its decadence-in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. To this may be added the attempt to revive it in our own day, by the school of the so-called Félibres, including Mistral, Aubanel, Alphonse Daudet, and others, who have worked vigorously, and with no mean success, to produce a modern literature in the old dialect, worthy of its former dignity. In this preface it is impossible to mention any part of the prose of this marvellous literature, which sprang al:nost suddenly into a gigantic growth, that has been a fruitful theme for wonder and admiration ever since, and left its influence widely felt. The point that is to the purpose here, concerns the invention by the Provençal poets of many set forms of verse, some few of which are still written, but most so altered and renewed by later use, that their original character is well-nigh obscured. The forms included in this book are often erroneously attributed en masse to the jongleurs of Provence, yet few assumptions are less

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true. Altered by the Trouvères, the fifteenth century poets, the Ronsardists, and later writers, it is safer to assign to the Troubadours only the germs which evolved gradually into their now matured forms. linger over the extraordinary period is a temptation hard to dismiss; the very name still has a flavour of romance, and brings a curious medley of images to the mind when it is heard, many perhaps as far from the actual Provençal Troubadour as Nanki-Poo in the "Mikado" is from the wandering minstrel of the court of King Thibaut. Of the Troubadours who have come down to fame, four hundred and sixty are recorded by name, besides two hundred and fifty-one pieces that have survived without evidence of their authors. King Richard I. (our own Cœur de Lion), Guillem de Cabestanh, Peire Vidal, Bertran de Born, The Monk of Montaudon, and many others, have biographical sketches of exceeding interest allotted to them in Mr. Hueffer's "The Troubadours." A halo of romance has gathered round their names, and thrown a glamour over the record of their lives; to read their history is to be transported to a region where all topics but love and song are deemed unimportant trifles, unless the old chroniclers are singularly untruthful in their statements. We know now-a-days many a young poet's crushed life appears only in his verses, and outside those he appears but an average Philistine to vulgar eyes. Perhaps the "land of the nightingale and rose was not so idyllic as its historians paint it; but with every deduction, there yet remains evidence of an exceptional importance attached to the arts, more especially to that of song. To those who wrote, or rather sang, witty impromptus (made often, we can but fancy, with much labour beforehand), or produced dainty conceits in elaborate rhymes and rhythms, when sound came perilously near triumphing over sense, a welcome was

extended, as widespread and far more personal in its application than even that accorded to our modern substitute for the troubadour-the popular novelist. The doings of the Courts of Love, set down in sober chronicles, are hardly less fantastic than Mr. Gilbert's ingenious operas. Matters of the most sentimental and amorous character were debated in public, with all the earnestness of a question of state. That their poetry was singularly limited in its character there is little doubt, but Mr. Hueffer declares that it had its serious side, often lost sight of, and that no small portion was devoted to stately and dignified subjects. Mr. Lowell, on the other hand, in an essay on Chaucer in My Study Windows, says―

"Their poetry is purely lyric in its most narrow sense, that is, the expression of personal and momentary moods. To the fancy of the critics who take their cue from tradition, Provence is a morning sky of early summer, out of which innumerable larks rain a faint melody (the sweeter because rather half divined than heard too distinctly) over an earth where the dew never dries and the flowers never fade. But when we open Raynouard it is like opening the door of an aviary. We are deafened and confused by a hundred minstrels singing the same song at once, and more than suspect the flowers they welcome are made of French cambric, spangled with dew-drops of prevaricating glass."

The forms in which the Provençal poets wrote were chiefly these:-The oldest was called vers, and consisted of octosyllabic lines arranged in stanzas; from this grew the canzo, with interlaced rhymes-later on with the distinctive feature still prominent in French, but unknown in English poetry, the rhymes masculine and feminine. The canzo was used entirely for subjects of love and gallantry, but the sirvente, composed of short stanzas, simply rhyming, and corresponding one to the

other, was employed for political and social subjects, sometimes treated seriously, at others satirically. The tenso was a curious trial of skill in impromptu versification. Two antagonists met and agreed that the one should reply on the opposite side to any argument the first might select. The opening stanza, chosen at will by the speaker, was imitated in the reply, both in observance of its rhyme and rhythm, the same rhymesound being often kept throughout the whole poem. It must not be forgotten that the Langue d'Oc was singularly fertile in rhymnes, so that the feat was less arduous than it would be in other tongues. The alba, a farewell at morning, and the serena, or evening song, the pastorella, devoted, as its name implies, to pastoral subjects, appear to govern the themes of the verses rather than the form. There is record, however, of the breu-doble (double short), invented by Guirant Riquier, a little form with three rhymes, two of which are repeated twice in three fourlined stanzas, and given once in a concluding couplet, while the third finished each quatrain. The retroensa is noticeable for its refrain of more than one line. The sonnet has ceased to be claimed as a Provençal invention, yet it must be noted, as at one time its origin there was a favourite theory. The ballade, a song serving to accompany the dance," must not be confused with the later ballade; and lastly, the greatest in most respects, the sestina, which, as it occurs among the poems noticed technically later on, need not be further mentioned here.

"The artificial verse-forms of Provence include some as peculiar and arbitrary as ever issued from the brain of Persian poet-verse-forms by the side of which the metrical glitter of ballade, chant royal, rondeau, rondel, triolet, virelai and villanelie must pale," says a writer in the Westminster Review (October 1878), and instances the tenso and the sestina in proof of his

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assertion. Mr. Hueffer also treats the chant royal as mere child's play beside the intricate feats displayed by the Troubadours. The above short list shows many examples of forms using the refrain and some other features preserved in Northern poetry; but the debt owed by the North to the Troubadours is far less, according to later writers, than that assigned to Provençal influence some few years ago. Mr. Saintsbury says that poems called rondeaux and ballades, of loose construction and undecided form, began to make their appearance at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century," but the forms as we know them owe their present shape to their reformation in Northern France, culminating in the poems of Charles d'Orléans and François Villon. In this revival, the lai and pastourelle kept their Provençal titles, but were made much more exact in form, and never attained the widespread celebrity of the newer shapes, which are to all intents and purposes the models for the forms in this volume, save the scstina, which is practically an Italian, and the pantoum, an Eastern form.

There is no space here to notice more than the names of a few of even the most prominent of the poets who succeeded the Provençal singers in their use of these forms. There are thousands of ballades in MSS. in the Royal French Library, by known and unknown writers. Eustache Deschamps (1328-1415), a friend of Chaucer's, "has left no less than 1175 ballades. Rondeaus, virelais, etc., also proceeded in great numbers from his pen; also an important Art of Poetry, a treatise rendered at once necessary and popular by the fashion of artificial rhyming.' Some of the earliest ballades and rondel-triolets bear the name of Jehan Froissart (1337-1410), the chronicler. Messire Guy de la Tremouille, according to Mr. Gosse, is supposed to have * See Saintsbury's Short History of French Literature, p. 103.