It would appear, though such things can never be quite certain, that, as we should indeed expect, the first developments of Provencal lyric were of the hymn kind, and perhaps originally mixtures of Romance and Latin. This mixture of the vernacular and the learned tongues, both spoken in all probability with almost equal facility by the writer, is naturally not uncommon in the Middle Ages: and it helps to explain the rapid transference of the Latin hymn-rhythms to vernacular verse. Thus we have a _Noel_ or Christmas poem not only written to the tune and in the measure of a Latin hymn, _In hoc anni circulo_, not only crowning the Provencal six-syllable triplets with a Latin refrain, "De virgine Maria," and other variations on the Virgin's title and name, but with Latin verses alternate to the Provencal ones. This same arrangement occurs with a Provencal fourth rhyme, which seems to have been a favourite one. It is arranged with a variety which shows its earliness, for the fourth line is sometimes "in the air" rhyming to nothing, sometimes rhymes with the other three, and sometimes forces its sound on the last of them, so that the quatrain becomes a pair of couplets. [Sidenote: _Forms._] The earliest purely secular lyrics, however, are attributed to William IX., Count of Poitiers, who was a crusader in the very first year of the twelfth century, and is said to have written an account of his journey which is lost. His lyrics survive to the number of some dozen, and show that the art had by his time received very considerable development. For their form, it may suffice to say that of those given by Bartsch[179] the first is in seven-lined stanzas, rhymed _aaaabab_, the _a_-rhyme lines being iambic dimeters, and the _b_'s monometers. Number two has five six-lined stanzas, all dimeters, rhymed _aaabab_: and a four-lined finale, rhymed _ab, ab_. The third is mono-rhymed throughout, the lines being disyllabic with licence to extend. And the fourth is in the quatrain _aaab_, but with the _b_ rhyme identical throughout, capped with a couplet _ab_. If these systems be compared with the exact accounts of early French, English, and German lyric in chapters v.-vii., it will be seen that Provencal probably, if not certainly, led the way in thus combining rhythmic arrangement and syllabic proportion with a cunning variation of rhyme-sound. It was also the first language to classify poetry, as it may be called, by assigning special forms to certain kinds of subject or--if not quite this--to constitute classes of poems themselves according to their arrangement in line, stanza, and rhyme. A complete prosody of the language of _canso_ and _sirvente_, of _vers_ and _cobla_, of _planh_, _tenso_, _tornejamens_, _balada_, _retroensa_, and the rest, would take more room than can be spared here, and would hardly be in place if it were otherwise. All such prosodies tend rather to the childish, as when, for instance, the _pastorela_, or shepherdess poem in