The origin of the Provençal language can of course not be referred to a particular year nor even to a particular century. Its development was gradual and slow. But it is a remarkable fact, that after it had once taken literary form and substance, no signs of change or further growth are noticeable. Two centuries in the German or English, or indeed any living language, constitute enormous differences as regards phraseology, orthography, and grammatical structure. Johnson had difficulties in fully understanding Shakespeare, a modern German is puzzled by many expressions in Luther’s Bible; and this, after these languages had become fixed by the introduction of printing, and a generally acknowledged standard of grammatical regularity. But the first troubadour known to us, Guillem of Poitiers, born in 1071, uses exactly the same grammar, the same structure of sentences, and even in all essential points the same poetic diction, as his last successor two hundred years after him.[1] The cause of this unusual stability must be looked for in the fact already pointed out, that the Provençal was not, strictly speaking, a living language used by all, and for all purposes, but the exclusive speech of an exclusive class, reserved moreover for the expression of courteous love and chivalry. Even where, for the purposes of satire and personal invective, the terms of low life are introduced, they have to submit to the strict rules of grammar and metre. At the end of the thirteenth century the _langue d’oc_, as a means of poetic utterance at least, disappears again, as suddenly almost as it had emerged from obscurity. Learned societies and scholarly poets and writers vainly tried to keep alive the interest which had vanished with the last of the knightly singers. _Jeux floraux_ were started, and golden primroses rewarded the successful efforts of learned competitors. But the true life of poetry was gone. By the crusade against the Albigeois and the subsequent conquest of the French south by the north, the spirit of the Provençal nobility had been broken. No lordly castles invited, no gifts encouraged the Troubadour, and by his silence all vitality and zest was lost to the _langue d’oc_, which henceforth degenerated into a common patois; the rapid intrusion of northern French idioms consequent on the political events alluded to accelerating its final doom—final, for all the attempts at reviving the old splendour of the _langue d’oc_ have as yet proved abortive. The patois of Mistral’s _Mireïo_ has little in common with the language of the mediæval singers, and his gifted disciples’ strenuous efforts stand little chance against the crushing influence of an idiom formed by Voltaire’s prose and Alfred de Musset’s poetry. CHAPTER II. EARLY POPULAR EPICS.