It has already been observed in discussing the Fabliaux that the first enquirers into old French literature were led to include a very miscellaneous assortment of poems under that head; and it may now be added that this miscellaneous assortment with much else constitutes the _farrago_ of the present chapter. The two great poems of the _Roman du Renart_ and the _Roman de la Rose_ stand as representatives of the more or less serious poetry of the time, and everything else may be said to be included between them. Beginning nearest to the _Roman du Renart_ and its kindred Fabliaux, we find a vast number of half-satirical styles of poetry, many, if not most of them, known (according to what has been noted in the preface as characteristic of mediaeval literature) by distinctive form-names. Of these _dits_ and _debats_ have already been noticed, but it is not easy to give a notion of the number of the existing examples, or of the extraordinary diversity of subjects to which both, and especially the _dits_, extend. Perhaps some estimate may be formed from the fact that the _dits_ of three Flemish poets alone, Baudouin de Conde, Jean de Conde, and Watriquet de Couvin, fill four stout octavo volumes[83]. The subjects of these and of the large number of _dits_ composed by other writers and anonymous are almost innumerable. The earliest are for the most part simple enumerations of the names of streets, of street cries, of guilds, of coins, and such-like things. By degrees they become more definitely didactic, and at last allegorical moralising masters them as it does almost every other kind of poetry in the fourteenth century. The _debat_, sometimes called _dispute_, or _bataille_, is an easily understood variety of the _dit_. Ruteboeuf's principal _debat_ has been named; another in a less serious spirit is that between _Charlot et le Barbier_. There is a _Bataille des Vins_, a _Bataille de Careme et de Charnage_, a _Debat de l'Hiver et l'Ete_, etc., etc. Another name much used for half-satirical, half-didactic verse was that of _Bible_, of which the most famous (probably because it was the first known) is that of Guyot de Provins,--a violent onslaught on the powers that were in Church and State by a discontented monk. An extract from it will illustrate this division of the subject as well as anything else:--