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310 finished craftsman, of language, and it is evident that it was the brilliant art of the Provençal's elaborated verse which delighted the Italian. In the De vulgari eloquentia Dante returned to the praise of Arnaut Daniel, as the greatest of all those who have sung of love, and Petrarch was not less enthusiastic. His invention of forms of verse (see ), in particular, dazzled the great Italians. But the seventeen sirventés which have survived scarcely sustain the traditional idea of the supremacy of Arnaut Daniel as a poet, while their lack of historical and personal allusions deprives them of general interest. Dante was curiously anxious to defend Arnaut Daniel as being a better artist than his immediate rival, Giraut de Bornelh, whose &ldquo;rectitude&rdquo; Dante admits, in the sense that Giraut was a singer of gnomic verses of a high morality, but prefers the poetry of Daniel; critical posterity, however, has reversed this verdict. Giraut came from the neighbourhood of Limoges, passed over into Spain about 1180, and became famous in the courts of Pedro II. of Aragon and other Spanish monarchs. He disappears about 1230. There is a curious anecdote of his having incurred the hatred or the cupidity of the viscount of Limoges, who robbed him of his library and then burned his house to the ground. Giraut laments, in his poems, the brutality of the age and the lawlessness of princes. A troubadour of the same district of south-western France was Arnaut de Mareuil, to whom is attributed the introduction into Provençal poetry of the amatory epistle. He settled at the courts of Toulouse and Beziers, where he sang, in mystical terms, his passion for the countess Adalasia, in whose affections he had a dangerous rival in the person of Alfonso II., king of Aragon. Arnaut de Mareuil fled for his life to Montpellier, where he found a protector in Count William VIII., but he continued to address his sirventés to Adalasia. As that princess died in 1199, and as no planh to her memory is found among the works of Arnaut de Mareuil, it is conjectured that by that time he was already dead.

Peire Vidal of Toulouse was the type of the reckless and scatterbrained troubadour. His biographer says that he was &ldquo;the maddest man in all the world.&rdquo; His early life was a series of bewildering excursions through France and Spain, but he settled down at last at Marseilles, where he made a mortal enemy of Azalaïs, the wife of Viscount Barral de Baux, from whom he stole a kiss (1180). Vidal fled to Genoa, but he continued to address the viscountess in his songs. At the entreaty of her husband, Azalaïs forgave the poet, and Peire Vidal returned to Marseilles. He committed a thousand follies; among others, being in love with a lady called Louve (she-wolf), the poet dressed himself as a wolf, and was hunted by a pack of hounds in front of the lady's castle. Starting on a crusade, he stopped at Cyprus, where a Greek girl was presented to him as being of the imperial family. He married her, assumed the title of emperor, and carried a throne about with him from camp to camp. According to a late poem, his eccentric adventures closed in Hungary about the year 1215. Folquet of Marseilles was a troubadour of Italian race, the son of a merchant of Genoa; Dante met Folquet in paradise, and gives an interesting notice of him. He was a rival with Peire Vidal for the favours of the beautiful Azalaïs; and he was one of the troubadours who gathered around the unfortunate Eudoxia, empress of Montpellier, until the close of her singular and romantic adventure (1187). He wrote a very touching planh on the death of the viscount Barral de Baux in 1192. Soon after this, disgusted with love, Folquet took holy orders, became the abbot of the rich Cistercian house of Torronet in Provence, and in 1205 became bishop of Toulouse. Here he threw in his lot with Simon de Montfort and disgraced himself by his fanatic rage against the Albigenses, of whom a contemporary says that he slew 500,000 persons, acting &ldquo;more like Antichrist than like an envoy of Rome.&rdquo; Folquet died in 1231 in the abbey of Grandselve, in his diocese. It is in the sirventés of Folquet that critics have seen the earliest signs of that decadence which was so rapidly to destroy Provençal poetry.

Gaucelm Faidit came from Uzerche, in the Limousin. He

seems to have been a wandering minstrel of gay and reckless habits, and to have been accompanied by a light-o'-love, Guillelma Monja, who was the object of much satire and ridicule. In Gaucelm we probably see, if we can credit his story, the troubadour at his lowest social level. He made, however, Maria of Ventadour, who was probably a scion of the princely and neighbouring house of that name, the object of his songs, and he addresses her in strains of unusual pathos and delicacy. Gaucelm Faidit ultimately proceeded to Italy, to the court of the marquis Boniface of Montferrat, a prince who greatly encouraged the troubadours and who in 1201 undertook the conduct of a crusade. Gaucelm, who was still celebrating the perfections of Maria of Ventadour, accompanied him to the East. He wrote several canzones in the Holy Land and Syria, returned safely to Uzerche, and disappears about 1240. We possess sixty of his poems. Another troubadour, Raimbaut of Vaquières, passed the greater part of his life at the same court of Montferrat; he devoted himself to the Lady Beatrix, sister of the marquis. It is believed that he died in the Holy Land in 1207. The most celebrated of the Italian troubadours was Sordello, born at Mantua, at the beginning of the 13th century, who owes his fame rather to the benevolence of later poets, from Dante to Robert Browning, than to the originality of his adventures or the excellence of his verse.

We have now mentioned the troubadours who were most famous in their own time, and on the whole modern criticism has been in unison with contemporary opinion. There are, however, still one or two names to be recorded. The English historian of the troubadours, Dr Hueffer, gave great prominence to the writings of a poet who had previously been chiefly heard of in connexion with a romantic adventure, Guillem de Cabestanh (or Capestang). This was a knight of Roussillon, who made love to Seremonda, countess of Castel-Roussillon. The lady's husband, meeting the poet out hunting, slew him in a paroxysm of jealousy and, having cut out his heart, had it delicately cooked and served to his wife's dinner. When Seremonda had eaten her lover's heart, her husband told her what she had done, and she fainted away. Coming to her senses she said: &ldquo;My Lord, you have served to me so excellent a dish that I will never eat of another,&rdquo; and she threw herself out of window and was killed. The importance of this story lies in the fact that the cruelty of the count of Castel-Roussillon was the cause of universal scandal in all good society. Feeling grew so strong that the surrounding nobles rose against the murderer, with Alfonso, king of Spain, at their head, hunted him down and killed him. The bodies of the lady and the troubadour were buried side by side, with great pomp, in the cathedral of Perpignan, and became the objects of pilgrimage. Doubt has, of course, been thrown on the veracity of this romantic story, but at all events it testifies to the fact that the troubadour enjoyed, or was expected to enjoy, all the privileges of toleration and exemption. A burlesque or satiric troubadour, who disregarded the laws of gallantry and wrote satires of great virulence against the ladies and their lovers, remains anonymous, and is spoken of as the monk or prior of Montaudon.

The classic period of the troubadours lasted until about 1210, and was contemporaneous with the magnificence of the nobles of the south of France. The wealth and cultivated tastes of the seigneurs, and the peace which had long surrounded them, led them into voluptuous extravagances and sometimes into a madness of expenditure. From this the troubadours reaped an immediate advantage, but when the inevitable reaction came they were the first to suffer. The great cause, however, of the decadence and ruin of the troubadours was the struggle between Rome and the heretics. This broke out into actual war in June 1209, when the northern barons, called to a crusade by Pope Innocent III., fell upon the Albigenses and pillaged Beziers and Carcassonne. Most of the protectors of the troubadours were, if not heretics, indulgent to the heretical party, and shared in their downfall. The poets, themselves, were not immediately injured, and no doubt their habits and their art kept them immune from the instant religious catastrophe,