The fierceness and rancor displayed by the troubadours in their attacks upon obnoxious personages, in an age of irresponsible authority, can only be explained upon the hypothesis that they were encouraged and protected by the force of overwhelming public sentiment. Their poems were composed in the Langue d’Oc, the first perfected and the most important of the Romance languages,--an idiom of great compass and power, and beyond the Loire used by the educated and polished members of society alone. The finest of these productions frequently owed their origin to authors destitute of literary culture; many troubadours could not even read. They evinced no admiration of the beauties of nature. The stanzas were isolated, often absolutely without continuity. A common similarity of type and resemblance of ideas pervaded all. It is a singular circumstance, that in form and metrical arrangement the last poem of a troubadour was not, in any important particular, superior to the oldest, at present, known; there was no improvement in two hundred years. In delicacy of sentiment, in vigor of expression, in sweetness of melody, these compositions are not excelled by the lyrics of any nation. Their analogy to those of the Spanish Mohammedans is striking and self-evident. There is the same play of words, the same predominating class of subjects, the same far-fetched and extravagant similes, the same incessant obtrusion of the author’s personality. The Langue d’Oc contains a greater number of rhyming terminations than any other language except Arabic; a coincidence to be attributed to imitation or a common poetic taste, and certainly not the result of accident. In the productions of both idioms the prevailing rhyme is by distichs, and occurs throughout the entire poem, the second verse of every distich always ending with the same sound; and the meaning is often obscured or sacrificed to preserve continuous harmony of versification.