In this strain the monk continues through fifteen stanzas, scattering abuse broadcast, and if his wit sometimes seems to desert him, it must, at least, be owned that his spite is genuine and unflagging. But in his case also the manuscripts contain an additional stanza of retributive justice, most likely by a later copyist. ‘With the sixteenth stanza,’ it says, ‘the false Monk of Montaudon will be satisfied, he who quarrels and fights with every one. He has deserted God for a flitch of bacon, and for his ever attempting to write _canzos_ and verses he ought to be hung up in the wind.’ Such was literary criticism amongst the troubadours—a not very edifying spectacle, upon which, the reader perhaps may think, too many words have been wasted already. So we will drop the curtain on the Monk of Montaudon, not without a good-natured smile at his weaknesses, nor without wonderment at an age which burnt and quartered thousands of virtuous Albigeois, and tolerated, or even approved of, such doings and such utterances in a monk. But, before leaving the subject finally, I must warn the reader not to judge the general tone of the Provençal _sirventes_ by the few examples of personal satire here specified. The troubadours grow, as Schiller says, with their greater purpose. In reproving the moral evils of their time, the decay of piety, the avarice of the great, the outrages of clerical pride, they frequently attain to an almost Dantesque power of conception and imagery. I know of few grander ideas in poetry than Marcabrun’s picture of the enormous tree, whose branches mingle with the clouds, whose roots spread down to mid-earth. To it are tied innumerable multitudes of all classes, from king to beggar. For the tree is the eternal evil of the world, and avarice and covetousness are the bonds which fetter mankind. But such objective depth of idea must not be expected from the Monk of Montaudon. He is a broadly humorous figure, and although characteristic in many ways of his time and country, he must not blind us to the serious currents of thought moving the age in which he lived, and the literature of which he represents one feature. We must look at him as one of those burlesque types by which the terrible seriousness of man’s life and thoughts is fortunately relieved at intervals—a product of nature’s creative humour in one of her most whimsical moods. CHAPTER XXI. THE REFORMATION OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.