The exact border-line between troubadour and joglar cannot be drawn without difficulty. Sometimes, as we have seen, the two offices were combined in one person, at others the same individual rose from the lower to the higher class. Of Marcabrun, for instance, subsequently one of the most celebrated troubadours, we are told that he began his career as apprentice or joglar to another poet named Cercamon.[8] The safest distinction is arrived at by bearing in mind that the joglars were principally, though by no means exclusively, musicians and executants, the converse ratio of the creative and executive faculties obtaining amongst the superior class of poets. For that position the Troubadours claimed for themselves, and took good care to let the world know of their claim. Towards the joglars, immediately dependent on their productions, they frequently adopt the tone of haughty condescension. ‘Bayona,’ Raimon de Miraval addresses an unfortunate singer, ‘I know well it is for a _sirventes_ that you have come amongst us. And counting this there will be three; for two I have made already by which you have gained much gold and silver, Bayona, and many a worn coat, and other clothes good and bad.’ ‘Goodness! Bayona,’ he says in another poem, ‘how poverty-stricken do I see you! badly dressed in a mean gown! But I will draw you from your poverty with a sirventes which I offer you.’ In other places the troubadours express anxious doubts as to the memory and capacity of their interpreters, and seriously exhort the latter to adhere strictly to the original as transmitted to them by personal instruction. ‘My son,’ Perdigo addresses his joglar, ‘on your honour, I charge you to take good care that you understand the work and do not deface it.’ Other poets sought safety from truncation in the well-knitted and compact woof of their stanzas, which would not allow of the omission of a single verse or rhyme without manifest detriment to the whole organism. ‘Marcabrun,’ that celebrated troubadour boasts of himself, ‘knows how to turn and interlace sense and verse in such a way that no other man can take away a single word;’ which precaution, by the way, answered against plagiarists as well as against slovenly reciters. But the same feeling of ill-disguised contempt which some troubadours betray for their immediate subordinates, others extend to the whole class of singers and performers, and especially the works of later poets are full of bitter invective against the meanness, vulgarity, and innumerable other vices and shortcomings of the joglars. The nobles are reproved for receiving them at their castles, and the decline of poetic art is not unjustly attributed to the growing taste for the buffooneries cultivated by the lower grades of the body poetic.