In this northern lyric--that is to say, northern as compared with Provencal[129]--we find all or almost all the artificial forms which are characteristic of Provencal itself, some of them no doubt rather sisters than daughters of their analogues in the _langue d'oc_. Indeed, at the end of our present period, and still more later, the ingenuity of the _trouveres_ seems to have pushed the strictly formal, strictly artificial part of the poetry of the troubadours to almost its furthest possible limits in varieties of _triolet_ and _rondeau_, _ballade_ and _chant royal_. But the _Romances_ and the _Pastourelles_ stand apart from these, and both are recognised by authorities among the troubadours themselves as specially northern forms. The differentia of each is in subject rather than in form, the "romance" in this sense being a short love-story, with little more than a single incident in it sometimes, but still always possessing an incident; the _Pastourelle_, a special variety of love-story of the kind so curiously popular in all mediaeval languages, and so curiously alien from modern experience, where a passing knight sees a damsel of low degree, and woos her at once, with or without success, or where two personages of the shepherd kind sue and are sued with evil hap or good. In other words, the "romance" is supremely presented in English, and in the much-abused fifteenth century, by the _Nut-Browne Maid_, the "pastourelle" by Henryson's _Robene and Makyne_. Perhaps there is nothing quite so good as either in the French originals of both; certainly there is nothing like the union of metrical felicity, romantic conduct, sweet but not mawkish sentiment, and never-flagging interest in the anonymous masterpiece which the ever-blessed Arnold preserved for us in his _Chronicle_. But the diffused merits--the so-to-speak "class-merits"--of the poems in general are very high indeed: and when the best of the other lyrics--_aubades_, _debats_, and what not--are joined to them, they supply the materials of an anthology of hardly surpassed interest, as well for the bubbling music of their refrains and the trill of their metre, as for the fresh mirth and joy of living in their matter. The "German paste in our composition," as another Arnold had it, and not only that, may make us prefer the German examples; but it must never be forgotten that but for these it is at least not improbable that those would never have existed. [Footnote 129: This for convenience' sake is postponed to chap. viii.] To select capital examples from so large a body is no easy task. One or two, indeed, have "made fortune," the most famous of them being the great _aubade_ (chief among its kind, as "En un vergier sotz folha d'albespi" is among the Provencal albas), which begins-- "Gaite de la tor, Gardez entor Les murs, si Deus vos voie;"[130] and where the _gaite_ (watcher) answers (like a Cornish watcher of the pilchards)-- "Hu! et hu! et hu! et hu!"