mountain-stream, the boats at anchor, or bearing away _meus amores_, or gliding up the river _a sabor_. The _amiga_ lingers at the fountain, she goes to wash clothes or to bathe her hair in the stream, she meets her lover and dances at the pilgrim shrine, she waits for him under the hazel-trees, she implores the waves for news of him, she watches for the boats _pelo mar viir_. The language is native to the soil, far more so, at least, than in the _cantigas de amor_ and _cantigas de amigo_ written under foreign influence. Their French or Provençal words and learned forms[46] are replaced in the _cossante_ by forms Galician or Spanish. Despite its striking appearance to us now among _sirventes senes sal_ in the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_, it must be confessed that the early _cossante_ of King Sancho has a somewhat meagre, vinegar aspect, and the _genre_ could hardly have developed so successfully in the next half-century had it not been fixed in the country-side, ever ready to the hand of the poet in search of fresh inspiration. It is possible to exaggerate the effect of war on the life of the peasant. Portugal in the twelfth century was only gradually and by constant conflict winning its territory and independence. It had no fixed capital and Court at which the Provençal poets might gather. But while king and nobles and the members of the religious and military orders were engaged with the Moors to the exclusion of the Muses, so that they had no opportunity to introduce the new measures, the peasants in Galicia and Minho no doubt went on tilling the soil and singing their primitive songs. In the thirteenth century Provençal poetry flourished in Portugal, but so monotonously that it failed to kill the older lyrics, and they reacted on the imported poetry. In the trite conventions with which the latter became clothed the _cossante_ had a new opportunity of life. _Trobadores_ wearied by their own monotony, _jograes_ wishing to please a patron with a _novidade_, had recourse to the _cossante_. The _jogral_ wandering from house to house and town to town necessarily came into close touch with the peasants. Talented men among them, prompted by patrons of good taste, no doubt exercised the third requisite of a good _jogral_ (_doair’ e uoz e aprenderdes ben_, C. C. B. 388)--a good memory--not only in learning his patron’s verses to recite at other houses but in remembering the songs that he caught in passing from the lips of the peasants, songs of village mirth and dance, of workers in the fields and shepherds on the hills. These, developed and adorned according to his talent, he would introduce to the Court among his _motz recreamens e prazers_. When Joan de Guilhade in the middle of the thirteenth century complained that _os trobadores ja van para mal_ (C. V. 370), he might almost be referring to the fact that the stereotyped poems of the Portuguese _trobadores_ could no longer compete with the fresh charm of the _cossante_.