From the return and enthronement of Afonso III imitation of French and Provençal poetry was in full swing in Portugal. The long sojourn of the prince in France, accompanied by several noblemen who figure in the _Cancioneiros_ (as Rui Gomez de Briteiros and D. Joan de Aboim), had an important bearing on the development of Portuguese poetry. He came back determined to act the part of an enlightened patron of letters; he encouraged the immigration of men of learning from France and maintained three _jograes_ permanently in his palace.[80] Princes and nobles as _trobadores_ for their own pastime, the _segreis_,[81] knights who went from Court to Court and received payment for the recital of their own verses, the _jograes_, belonging to a lower station, who recited the poems of their patrons the _trobadores_, all vied in imitation of the love songs of Provence. In general, i. e. in the structure of their poems, the resemblance is close and clear enough. The decasyllabic love song in three or four stanzas with an _envoi_, the satirical _sirventes_, the _tenson_ (_jocs-partits_) in which two poets contended in dialogue, the _descort_ in which the discordant sounds expressed the poet’s distress and grief, the _balada_ of Provence, the _ballette_ and _pastourelle_ of North France, were all faithfully reproduced. If, on the other hand, we look for imitations in detail it is perhaps natural that we should find them less frequently.[82] The conventional character of the Portuguese poems would sufficiently account for this, and moreover their models were probably more often heard than read, so that reproduction of the actual thought or words would be difficult. When Airas Nunez in a poem of striking beauty, which is almost a sonnet (C. V. 456), wrote the lines: Que muito m’eu pago d’este verão Por estes ramos et por estas flores Et polas aves que cantan d’amores, he need not have read Peire de Bussinac’s lines: Quan lo dous temps d’Abril Fa ’ls arbres secs fulhar E ’ls auzels mutz cantar Quascun en son lati,