this and many other occasions are always one or two, more rarely three, individuals, generally friends of the contending parties, or else well-meaning and courteous persons, men or women, who decide according to the rules of common sense, or quote the opinions of celebrated troubadours by way of rule and guidance. Not once is a ‘court of love’ mentioned in these _tensos_, nor indeed in any other poem, by a genuine troubadour, The expression as well as the thing was unknown to them. Both belong to a much later time. The period of spontaneous production in the literature of most nations is followed by that of classification. Byzantine scholarship and Athenian tragedy belong to different phases of intellectual life. When the poetry of the troubadours began to decay, grammarians and metrical scholars sprang up, and artificial poetry flourished at the _Jeux Floraux_. In the same sense it may be said that ‘courts of love’ could not exist while love itself was alive. The laws of gallantry were inscribed in the hearts of ladies and troubadours while the brilliant, buoyant life of Southern France was in its acme. When this civilisation was crushed, when these beautiful times lived but in the remembrance of a few, it might become necessary to preserve in dead formulas and codes the remnants of a better past. But even in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the south of France seems not to have been a favourable soil for the ‘courts of love,’ as certain amateur societies of gallant and literary ladies and gentlemen then began to be called. The chief witness on the subject, Andreas Capellanus, who quotes several sentences delivered by these _curiæ dominarum_, seems to refer chiefly to the north of France.[31] Another Frenchman, Martial d’Auvergne, an advocate in Paris, has introduced the technical language of the law into these amorous discussions; much to the edification of his contemporaries (he lived in the fifteenth century), to judge from the number of editions published of his work. The sober truth arrived at by these and many other considerations too long to mention may be summed up thus: ‘Courts of love,’ as established tribunals with written codes, are altogether fictitious. Amateur societies of that name occur in the late middle ages, but chiefly in the north of France. To the troubadours the name and essence of ‘courts of love’ were entirely unknown. _PART III._ TECHNICAL CHAPTER XXVIII. THE ORIGIN OF RHYME.