Street ditties occupy an intermediate place between literate and illiterate poesy. Once the repertory of the itinerant _bufo_ was drawn from a source which might be called popular without qualifying the term. With the pilgrim and the roving apprentice he was a chief agent in the diffusion of ballads. Even now he has a right to be remembered in any account of the songs of Provence; but, having given him mention, we must leave the streets to go to the well-heads of popular inspiration--the straggling village, the isolated farm, the cottage alone on the byeway. When in the present century there was a revival of Provencal literature, after a suspension of some five hundred years, the poets who devoted their not mean gifts to this labour of love discerned, with true insight, that the only Provencal who was still thoroughly alive was the peasant. Through the long lapse of time in the progress of which Provence had lost its very name--becoming a thing of French departments--the peasant, it was discovered, had not changed much; acting on which discovery, the new Provencal school produced two works of a value that could not have been reached had it been attempted either to give an archaic dress to the ideas and interests of the modern world, or to galvanise the dry bones of mediaeval romance into a dubious animation. These works are _Mireio_ and _Margarido_. Mistral, with the idealising touch of the imaginative artist, paints the Provence of the valley of the Rhone, whilst Marius Trussy photographs the ruder and wilder Provence of mountain and torrent. Taken together, the two poems perfectly illustrate the _Wahrheit und Dichtung_ of the life of the people whose songs we have to study.