The value of the fragment as it stands is of a philological rather than of a literary kind, owing to the numerous archaic forms and words occurring in it, many of which have disappeared from the later Provençal. With the exception of a short hymn in praise of St. Eulalia (published by Diez in his admirable edition of the work under discussion), ‘Boethius’ is generally considered to be the earliest poetic specimen of the _langue d’oc_, belonging, as it undoubtedly does, to the tenth century, and therefore preceding the first of the Troubadours by at least a hundred years. Of the remainder of the didactic poems the briefest notice must suffice. One class of them are large accumulations of human knowledge—encyclopædias in fact without the alphabetical arrangement—such as the ‘Tezaur’ (Treasure) by Master Corbiac, treating in Alexandrine lines of most known and unknown sciences, including geology, music, history, and necromancy; and the still more celebrated ‘Breviari d’Amor,’ an enormous compendium of mediæval wisdom, and most probably one of the most ponderous books ever written in spite of its promising title. Two manuscripts of this work are in the British Museum. The author’s name is Matfre Ermengau, a monk of Beziers, and the poem was begun, according to a statement in the preface, in 1288. How long it took the laborious poet to compose his 27,000 lines, heaven only knows. A poem by Daude de Pradas on the birds used for falconry, belonging to this class, may be of some interest to historically minded lovers of sport. But of much greater importance, and indeed invaluable to the student of manners and customs, is a second category of didactic poetry, consisting of rules and precepts of demeanour for certain classes of society, young ladies, pages, joglars or minstrels, and others. Some of these ‘ensenhamens,’ as they were called—for instance, that by Amanieu des Escas—have already been referred to in these pages. Others will be mentioned in due course.