Peire Vidal is one of the most versatile and many-sided amongst the troubadours. His character is a psychological riddle. High gifts and wildest eccentricities are strangely mixed up in it. But the riddle cannot be read from a purely individual point of view. Peire Vidal is also a type. His adventures and poems show as in a kaleidoscope the romantic and often exaggerated and whimsical ideas which animated his age and country. ‘Peire Vidal’—the old biography begins—‘was born in Toulouse, the son of a furrier; he sang better than any other poet in the world, and was one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believed everything to be just as it pleased him and as he would have it.’ That he grew to his greatness out of the meanest circumstances was a lot which he shared with some of the most famous of his brethren, such as Marcabrun and Folquet of Marseilles, and it accounts to a certain extent for many of his follies and illusions. The time of his birth it is impossible to state accurately; it appears, however, from several remarks in his poems, that it must have been somewhere about the middle of the twelfth century. In his youth he seems to have been very poor; thus in one of his earlier _canzos_ he addresses a lady in the following simple and frank words: ‘I have no castle with walls, and my land is not worth a pair of gloves, but there never was nor will be a more faithful lover than I am.’ When his genius had made him the favourite and companion of kings and nobles, he did not lack wealth. In his songs we never find a request for assistance from his protectors, such as often occurs in the stanzas of other troubadours, and he was even in a position to keep many servants and followers. He soon tired of a quiet life, and left home to find fortune and renown. First he went to Spain, where he was kindly received at the court of Alfonso II., King of Aragon, one of the most liberal protectors of the troubadours; but his restlessness could not endure a long sojourn in the same place. He went to Italy, and for many years was travelling about between that country, Spain, and the South of France, always well received by nobles and princes, and always in love with beautiful women. It would be impossible to give the names of the different objects of his admiration. The general character of these futile attachments was that the poet believed himself quite irresistible, and supposed no interval to exist between his seeing and conquering. ‘Often,’ he says, ‘I receive messages with golden rings and black and white ribbons. Hundreds of ladies would fain keep me with them if they could.’ In another _canzo_ he boasts that all husbands are afraid of him more than of fire and sword. In point of fact, however, the ladies he admired did not by any means justify these illusions, and his old biographer goes so far as to say that they all deceived him ‘totas l’engannavan.’ The best proof of