These are words of a man of genius, who has experienced the buffetings of adverse fortune, and the scorn of a world incapable or unwilling to fathom his depth. Morbid words, if the reader likes, but forcibly uttered, and instinct with a noble disdain of the fashions and follies of the day. But Peire Cardinal’s grievances were not of a narrow, egotistic kind. His poems reflect the sad time in which he lived, and the national disaster which he witnessed with deepest indignation. The avarice and selfishness of clergy and laity, the want of patriotic feeling, the barbarism prevailing amongst the nobles, and other evils fostered by those troublous times of internal and external warfare, are the favourite subjects of the poet’s satire. It need hardly be added that his sympathies were all with the South against the North. Raimon VI. is his chosen hero, whom he encourages with his songs, and in whose temporary success he rejoices. ‘At Toulouse,’ he sings, ‘there is Raimon the Count; may God protect him! As water flows from the fountain, so chivalry comes from him. Against the worst of men—nay, against the whole world—he defends himself. Frenchmen and priests cannot resist him. To the good he is humble and condescending; the wicked he destroys.’ In his accusations of the clergy, Peire is violent and sweeping; almost as violent as Guillem Figueira himself. But his censure almost always proceeds from a general motive; the difference between the two is that between a scholar and politician and a pamphleteer. Peire’s language, when he speaks of the domineering propensities of the priests, is as bitter as can be imagined, but his anger is founded on historic considerations of deepest import. It is the decay of the temporal power he deplores. ‘Formerly, kings and emperors, dukes, counts and comtors[29] and knights used to govern the world; but now priests have usurped its dominion with rapine and treachery and hypocrisy, with force and persuasion. They are incensed if everything is not conceded to them, and it must be done sooner or later.’ In another _sirventes_, Peire Cardinal alludes to the amiable habit of the priests—also mentioned by Guillem Figueira—of calling everyone a Vaudois or heretic who dares to resist their encroachments. One of the most forcible of Peire’s songs is directed against the avarice and covetousness of the priests, whom he compares to vultures scenting a dead body. In the same _sirventes_ we meet with one of those grand reflections which raise Peire Cardinal from the level of the mere satirist to that of the great moral poet. ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘what becomes of the riches of those who have unjustly acquired them? A mighty robber will come, who will leave them nothing. His name is Death; he will prostrate them, and entangle them in a net four yards in length, and they will be sent to a house of misery.’