general, was divided into _porquiera_, _cabreira_, _auqueira_, and other things, according as the damsel's special wards were pigs or goats or geese. Perhaps the most famous, peculiar, and representative of Provencal forms are the _alba_, or poem of morning parting, and the _sirvente_, or poem _not_ of love. The _sestina_, a very elaborate canzonet, was invented in Provence and borrowed by the Italians. But it is curious to find that the sonnet, the crown and flower of all artificial poetry, though certainly invented long before the decadence of Provencal, was only used in Provencal by Italian experimenters. The poets proper of the _langue d'oc_ were probably too proud to admit any form that they had not invented themselves. [Footnote 179: The _Grundriss zur Geschichte der Provenzalischen Literatur_ (Elberfeld, 1872) and the _Chrestomathie Provencale_ (3d ed., Elberfeld, 1875) of this excellent scholar will not soon be obsolete, and may, in the peculiar conditions of the case, suffice all but special students in a degree hardly possible in any other literature. Mahn's _Troubadours_ and the older works of Raynouard and Fauriel are the chief storehouses of wider information, and separate editions of the works of the chief poets are being accumulated by modern, chiefly German, scholars. An interesting and valuable addition to the _English_ literature of the subject has been made, since the text was written, by Miss Ida Farnell's _Lives of the Troubadours_, a translation with added specimens of the poets and other editorial matter.] [Sidenote: _Many men, one mind._] Next in noteworthiness to the variety of form of the Provencal poets is their number. Even the multitude of _trouveres_ and Minnesingers dwindles beside the list of four hundred and sixty named poets, for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries only, which Bartsch's list contains; some, it is true, credited with only a single piece, but others with ten, twenty, fifty, or even close to a hundred, not to mention an anonymous appendix of over two hundred and fifty poems more. Great, however, as is the bulk of this division of literature, hardly any has more distinct and uniform--its enemies may say more monotonous--characteristics. It is not entirely composed of love-poetry; but the part devoted to this is so very much the largest, and so very much the most characteristic, that popular and almost traditional opinion is scarcely wrong in considering love-poetry and Provencal poetry to be almost, and with the due limitation in the first case, convertible terms. [Sidenote: _Example of rhyme-schemes._] The spirit of this poetry is nowhere better shown than in the refrain of an anonymous _alba_, which begins-- "En un verger sotz folha d'albespi," and which has for burden-- "Oi deus! oi deus, de l'alba, tant tost ve!"