The north of France was the birth country and chief seat of epic poetry in the Middle Ages. The _chanson de geste_, the _roman_, the _fabliau_ frequently bear witness of a consummate grace of narrative diction. Even the lyrical effusions of the Trouvère not seldom take the form of the monologue or dialogue. The poet loves to hide his personality under the mask of a fictitious character. Sometimes he is the maiden longing for love and spring, who from the seclusion of her cloister raises her voice against the robbers of her liberty, _malois soit de deu ki me fist nonnete_; sometimes, like Rutebœuf, he listens to the vulgar quarrels of ‘Charlie and the barber,’ or, like Charles d’Orleans, the sweet chansonnier in French and English, holds converse with ... l’amoureuse deesse Qui m’apela demandant ou j’aloye. The narrative and dramatic instincts of modern French writers are distinctly manifest in their mediæval _confrères_. This is different with the Troubadour, the poet of Southern France. He is the lyrical singer _par excellence_, speaking in his own undisguised person and of his own subjective passion. Hence the truth and intensity, but hence also the monotonousness and conventional phraseology of passion, alternately characteristic of the Provençal love-song. But the narrative instinct was not entirely wanting in the poets of the _langue d’oc_. The great wave of epic song which kept continually crossing the Channel from the Celt to the French Norman, and back again to the Saxon and Anglo-Norman, left its flotsam on the shores of Southern France. Neither did the half-mystic glory of Charlemagne and his peers fail to impress the imagination of the chivalrous Troubadours. We possess, or at least know of the existence of, Provençal epics from both the Carlovingian and Arthurian circles. Although comparatively small in number and importance, these deserve a passing mention.