‘The Countess de Die,’ says the old manuscript, ‘was the wife of Guillem de Poitou and a good and beautiful lady; she became enamoured of Rambaut of Orange, and wrote many fine poems of him.’ This Rambaut was the third ruler of that name of the country of Aurenga or Orange, in the south of France, from which the Dutch line of the house of Nassau derived its name. The English cavaliers, by the way, were considerably out in their etymological reckoning when they derisively squeezed the orange. Rambaut is well known as the author of numerous poems, some of them rather coarse in character. One of his songs is metrically curious by the poet relapsing at the end of every stanza into a few lines of prose, in which admirers of Walt Whitman will perhaps discover rhythm. In another poem he gives an elaborate prescription for gaining the hearts and bending the minds of women, quite in the spirit of the coarsest scenes of the _Taming of the Shrew_. The apparent disagreement of the poet with his own rules expressed in one stanza does not much alter the case in his favour, neither can we consider his calling one of his lady-loves by the nickname ‘my Devil’ a sign of refinement on his part. The exaggerated and boldly uttered opinion of his own poetic power is an additional unpleasant feature of Rambaut’s character. His songs to Beatrice de Die, of which several remain, are marked by extravagant gallantry rather than by true feeling. It may, for instance, be doubted whether the lady had much reason to be pleased with compliments of this kind: ‘The joy you give me is such that a thousand doleful people would be made merry by my joy. And on my joy my whole family could live with joy without eating.’ The reader will notice the frequent repetition of the word ‘joy,’ which occurs once in every line of the stanza. This is an instance of the artificialities in which many troubadours, Rambaut of Orange foremost amongst the number, took pride. A similar metrical contrivance is found in another song by the same poet, most likely also addressed to the Countess de Die. It is called the ‘_rim dictional_,’ and consists of the combination, in the rhyming syllables, of two words which can be derived from each other by either adding or deducting one or more syllables. Thus, for instance, the feminine and masculine forms of the adjective and participle; _at-ada_, _ut-uda_ stand in the relation of ‘dictional rhymes.’ It is sadly significant to see that this silly contrivance has been adopted by Beatrice de Die in the song which expresses the fulness of her loving bliss. Perhaps it would be too bold to conjecture without additional evidence that, in this as in so many cases, the teacher had developed into the lover; but this sign of intellectual dependence is at any rate highly characteristic. To give the reader an idea of the sweetness of Beatrice’s metre and diction, I will quote one stanza of the poem alluded to in the original.