The king’s minstrels, and those of the great lords, were very well paid, but the great mass of the profession, who depended only on what they obtained in gifts at each particular feast, which they recklessly squandered away as soon as they got it, lived a hard as it was a vagabond life. The king’s minstrels, in the fourteenth century in England, received from sixpence to sevenpence halfpenny a day, that is from seven shillings and sixpence to nine shillings and fourpence halfpenny, during the whole year. On the other hand, Colin Muset, one of the best of the French song-writers of the thirteenth century, complains of the want of liberality shown to him by the great baron before whom he had played on the viol in his hostel, and who had given him nothing, not even his wages:-- _Sire quens, j’ai vielé_ _Devant vos en vostre ostel;_ _Si ne m’avez riens donné,_ _Ne mes gages acquiter._ And he laments that he is obliged to go home in poverty, because his wife always received him ill when he returned to her with an empty purse, whereas, when he carried back his _malle_ well stuffed, he was covered with caresses by his whole family. The French poet Rutebeuf, whose works have been collected and published by M. Jubinal, may be considered as the type of the better class of minstrels at this period, and he has become an object of especial interest to us in consequence of the number of his shorter effusions which describe his own position in life. The first piece in the collection has for its subject his own poverty. He complains of being reduced to such distress, that he had been obliged for some time to live upon the generosity of his friends; that people no longer showed any liberality to poor minstrels; that he was perishing with cold and hunger; and that he had no other bed but the bare straw. In another poem, entitled Rutebeuf’s Marriage, he informs us that his privations were made more painful by the circumstance of his having a shrew for his wife. In a third he laments over the loss of the sight of his right eye, and informs us that, among other misfortunes, his wife had just been delivered of a child, and his horse had broke its leg, so that, while he had no means of supporting a nurse for the former, the latter accident had deprived him of the power of going to any distance to exercise his minstrelsy craft. Rutebeuf repeats his laments on his extreme poverty in several other pieces, and they have an echo in those of other minstrels of his age. We find, in fact, in the verse-writers of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and in some of those of the fourteenth, a general complaint of the neglect of the minstrels, and of the degeneracy of minstrelsy. In a poem against the growing taste for the tabor, printed in M. Jubinal’s volume, entitled “Jougleurs et Trouvères,” the low state into which the minstrels’ art had fallen is ascribed to a growing love for instruments