The first of the Latin nations to acquire a cultivated vernacular literature was the Provençal. Many reasons, singly insufficient, but cumulatively of great force, may be adduced for this unquestionable priority. The language, which may be roughly but accurately described as a connecting link between French and Italian, as its Catalan and Valencian congeners form one between French and Spanish, is better adapted for poetical composition than French; while, the Latin influence being less oppressively overwhelming than in the land of the Romans, it escaped the ban of provinciality which so long prohibited serious literary composition in the vernacular speech of Italy. Before the demon of religious persecution was unchained by the Popes, the country enjoyed remarkable prosperity and tranquillity; the harsher features of the feudal system were mitigated by industry and commerce, while the aristocratical organisation of society ensured literature that patronage without which it could hardly have flourished in the absence of a reading class. The early poets of Provence were almost without exception the favourites of princes and noblemen, whose exploits they celebrated, whose enemies they satirised, whose own political course they sometimes inspired, and for whose gratification they vied with each other in improvised poetical contests (_tenzons_). Their strains, though occasionally lighted up by some bright thought which Petrarch subsequently did not disdain to appropriate, appear to us in general artificial and constrained. This is partly owing to the exaggeration of a virtue, that attention to “strictest laws of rhyme and rule,” in which, as an English poet truly declares, the bard finds “not bonds, but wings.” But the cultivation of form is carried too far when it becomes the end instead of the means, and the Provençal poets allowed themselves to be seduced by their language’s unequalled facilities for rhyming into an idolatry of the elaborate, which offered great impediments to the simple expression of feeling. Some of their strophes contain no fewer than twenty-eight verses, the same set of rhymes being carried through the whole stanza, and very frequently through the entire poem. Out of four hundred pieces in a single manuscript collection Ginguené found only two in the simple quatrain. It was fortunate for the Italians that their language, fluent and supple as it is, is incapable of such feats, and that, while adopting their lyrical measures from the Provençals, they could not, had they wished, cramp themselves by the reproduction of the latter’s _tours de force_.