ill to the ecclesiastical establishment, which, stained with every hideous and disgusting vice, was fast sinking into universal and deserved contempt. The practice of improvisation,--the composition of extemporaneous poetry,--derived from the imaginative but unlettered tribes of the Arabian Desert, and for generations the delight of the capitals of Moorish Spain, found here its most fascinating expression and its highest development. Next to the prince himself, the troubadour was the most important personage of the Provençal court. His accomplishments, often acquired by association with the Moslem, were the envy of the cavalier and the horror of the priest. His elegant manners and poetical talents gained for him the passionate adoration of high-born ladies, whose beauty he celebrated in florid and licentious verse. His satires were often directed against the clergy, whose lives too readily furnished cause for ridicule and censure. With him occasionally travelled the jongleur, who, to the recitation of amorous chants, added the charm of harmonious minstrelsy. The ditties of the troubadours, like the coarse and facetious tales of this and subsequent periods, afforded an unfailing index of popular taste and prevalent opinions. In their lays the ecclesiastic is almost invariably an object of derision. His hypocrisy, his licentiousness, his greed, are depicted in language which admits of no palliating or ambiguous interpretation. He is constantly represented as the proverbial embodiment of all that is execrable and repulsive. If a butt for ridicule was needed, to give an appropriate climax to a story composed for the amusement of the court, the monastery could be relied upon to furnish an inexhaustible number of subjects, whose foibles were at once recognized by the delighted and scoffing auditors. The sacred calling of the ministers of religion was constantly made the occasion of ribald pleasantry; the tricks of practical jokers were played with impunity upon every incumbent of the sacerdotal dignity, from the haughty bishop to the cowled and barefooted friar. Even the populace, in whom the spirit of superstitious reverence is always the first to be awakened and the last to be destroyed, shared in an equal degree the feelings of their superiors. The vagrant rhymer, declaiming his sarcastic verses in the streets or by the wayside, was always sure of a liberal and appreciative audience. Such a condition of society indicates a certain degree of intellectual progress which can only result from independence of thought and moral irresponsibility of action. The extraordinary opinion began to be advanced and largely accepted that the investiture of the priesthood, of itself, conveyed no special virtue which dispensed with the rules of social morality or conferred immunity from public criticism. This idea, at variance with all the traditions of a Church which attached the highest importance to the rigid observance of mere formalities, was followed by others