Nearly all this Provençal literature of three centuries of troubadours is lyric, not epic. It is generally singing, not narrating, and its theme is chiefly personal feelings. Rhymes, which had, it is true, been sparsely employed in monkish compositions in Latin, were then novel things in European literature, although long and universally used by the Saracens. The Provençal poets cultivated rhymes which grew more and more varied and complicated; with careful elaboration of soft and harmonious sounds they sang of two things, and almost only of two, to wit, love and glory, gallantry and chivalry in both senses and connections. The verses were love verses or martial verses, celebrating loyalty in love and valour in arms. As a class they are without pretension to any profoundness of imagination or to any sublimity. Their excellence is their music, not any translatable substance of thought. It must be confessed that the songs and subjects lacked variety; the same tricks of expression and “conceits,” the same nouns and adjectives, the same situations, the same “fantastic sentimentality,” would reappear monotonously, and would inevitably suggest the artificial and unreal. One could hardly be expected to read extensively in the _cansos_, or love-songs, of those who called themselves the “gentle troubadours,” without a feeling of satiety. The serenade (_serena_), the morning greeting (_alba_), the dispute of lovers (_tenso_ or _joc parti_), the lament (_planh_), which were recognized species of troubadour effort, inevitably suffered from exhaustion of material. Nevertheless one cannot but be impressed with the chivalrous idea of love which many of the Provençal poets professed, and according to which they nearly always treat that passion, vaunting a devoted tenderness and a delicate and sentimental worship. The influence of this idea, as still further refined and ennobled in Tuscany, is palpable in the attitude of Dante towards Beatrice, and of Petrarch towards Laura; there are many traces of its influence in Chaucer and his contemporaries. Through the Petrarchist sonneteers it again reaches England in the Elizabethan age.