[Illustration] THE TROUBADOURS O for a draught of vintage that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country-green, Dance and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! KEATS THE TROUBADOURS A HISTORY OF _PROVENÇAL LIFE AND LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES_ BY FRANCIS HUEFFER [Illustration] London CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1878 [_The right of translation is reserved_] LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET PREFACE. Articles by the present writer on the subject of Provençal life and literature have appeared off and on in the ‘New Quarterly Magazine,’ the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ ‘Macmillan’s Magazine,’ and the late ‘North British Review.’ But this book is not a reprint of essays, although some of the materials formerly used have been re-embodied in it. It claims on the contrary to be the first continuous and at all adequate account in the English language of the literary epoch which forms its subject. For I cannot concede that name to a book on ‘The Troubadours, their Loves and Lyrics,’ published some years ago; for reasons which it is not my province here to state. And yet, excepting only the English version of the unsatisfactory book which the Abbé Millot compiled from St. Palaye’s excellent materials, by that indefatigable translator and abridger in the last century, Mrs. Dobson, that volume is the only work on the Troubadours which England can boast of, at least as far as I am aware,—and of any important contribution to the subject I should be aware. By the side of the admirable criticisms of old French literature which we owe to English authors from the days of Cary and the ‘London Magazine’ to those of Mr. Andrew Lang and other gifted writers of the present time, this neglect of the _langue d’oc_ appears all the more glaring, especially when one considers the further fact that many of the districts in which the troubadours flourished were at the time when they flourished attached to the English crown. The amount of historical, and more especially English historical, material to be gleaned from the biographies and the works of the troubadours is indeed of the utmost value to the student.