It must be enough merely to mention the names of Bernard de Ventadour, Bertran de Born, Pierre Vidal, and Arnaud Daniel, among famous troubadours. But a word may be said of that remarkable institution, the “Court of Love,” to which a poem of Chaucer (or more probably of some one with a large share of Chaucer’s mind) owes its conception and its title. During the later generations of the “gentle troubadours,” the way to speak and think of love and gallantry was reduced to a system. It was made a science—called _el gai saber_, “the gay science”—which every poet was supposed to understand and to have at his finger-ends. One favourite form of poetry was the _tenso_, a dispute or altercation between troubadours upon delicate questions and scruples of behaviour and feeling in affairs of love. It became the fashion for noble ladies in those idle, rather frivolous, but doubtless not unhappy days to hold mock courts, in which poets sang one against the other, like opposing advocates; whereafter the court gave its decision, or _arrêt d’amour_, and awarded prizes to that troubadour whose arguments and verse were most in keeping with the code prescribed by the gay science. “Is it a greater grief to lose a lover by death or by unfaithfulness?” may serve as an example of the subjects particularly favoured in these poetical courts of the ladies of Gascony, of the Countess of Champagne, or of Queen Eleanor. Such, briefly, was the genuine Provençal literature—lyrics of love and bravery, with here and there a pastoral, and here and there a poem of censure or satirical criticism. But true epics and romances of adventure, sustained allegories, witty tales of common life, they had practically none. For these we must look to northern France, to the land not of the troubadours, but of the Trouvères. _Trouvère_ is the French form corresponding to the Provençal _troubadour_, and equally means the “finder,” who is indeed the “poet.” But in northern France there existed different social conditions and a different clime; there was also the sterner stuff which belongs to Franks and Normans, while in Brittany there was the Celt, with all his melancholy fire and imaginative and mystical emotion. The lyric literature of the north blossomed, indeed, somewhat later than that of Provence, and is largely an imitation of it. The romances of the trouvères are also distinctly infused with the ideas and style of the lyric south. Nevertheless the great mass of the poetry of northern France is of its own creation in both matter and spirit. It is the poetry of the epic, the allegory, and the tale; the poetry of the romance of heroic adventures, of satirical teaching, and of stories to amuse; in other words, it produced the _chanson de geste_, the _roman_, and the _fabliau_. It is in every way stronger than the creations of the south, in seriousness, in vigour, in variety, in invention. According to Ten Brink, _prouesse_, the masculine side of chivalry, is more northern,