Regarding the most striking incident, that of the lover’s heart being eaten by the lady, it is true that all the versions contain it, but other circumstances tend to throw grave doubts on its historic reality. For the same fact is told with some modifications of the Châtelain de Coucy, a celebrated poet of Northern France, no less historical than Guillem himself, and nearly his contemporary. The independent recurrence in the course of a few years of the same extraordinary fact is intrinsically much more unlikely than the supposition that the story of the eaten heart was, in some form or other, popular at the time, and therefore connected with the life of one of their celebrated poets by both northern and southern Frenchmen. Students of the ‘History of Fiction’ are aware that the local and individual application of a popular story to a popular hero is a most common process, and readers of Dunlop’s excellent work of that name may remember that the incident of the eaten heart is by no means confined to the age or country of Guillem de Cabestanh. I should indeed not feel surprised if one of our comparative mythologists were to prove that the vulture gnawing the head or liver of the fettered Prometheus is at the bottom of it all. But whatever may be the historical value of the story related in the above, it throws a striking and abundant light on the manners and feelings of mediæval Provence. Here we see the idea of the unlimited power of love carried to its extreme consequences. Margarida, a noble lady, adorned, as is expressly stated, with all virtues and accomplishments, does not hesitate at inviting the courtship of her inferior in rank in the most unmistakable manner. But the narrator, and evidently his public with him, think that everything is sufficiently accounted for by an allusion to the unconquerable impulse of love.