But another line of distinction may be drawn from the purely literary point of view previously indicated. The Troubadours, it has been said, were lyrical poets, and seem to have looked upon romancers, novelists, _et hoc genus omne_ with all the superciliousness of a higher caste. Of one poet it is distinctly stated that he was _no bos trobaire mas noellaire_, ‘not a good troubadour, but a story-teller.’ The Joglars, on the contrary, as we know from the ‘Ensenhamens,’ were bound to know and reproduce the whole store of facts and fables more or less common to the mediæval literatures of Western Europe. The slight and temporary character of most of these reproductions, and the comparative neglect with which they were treated by Provençal literati, have previously been touched upon, the scarcity of epical manuscripts in the _langue d’oc_ being the natural corollary of these two causes. For the number of joglars capable of wielding the pen must have been very small, and the scribes and scholars to whom we owe the admirable and large collections of lyrical pieces were naturally much less anxious to preserve the humble productions of the narrative muse. Hence the astounding fact above referred to that even of the epics of so renowned a poet as Arnaut Daniel not a single specimen remains, and the other circumstance, no less surprising, that the Provençal biographer passes over these important and evidently most popular works with complete silence, saving his literary conscience by a cursory reference to Arnaut as a ‘Joglar.’ It is a further significant fact that most of the narrative poems preserved—barring the scanty remains of the popular epic which belong to a separate epoch and circle of literary production—date from a comparatively late period when the all-engrossing sway of lyrical poetry, and with it the vitality of Provençal literature itself, began to dwindle. The social aspects of this decline and fall, its causes, and the vain efforts to check its detrimental force, are brought home to us in the stanzas of a noble-minded poet, Guiraut Riquier, justly called the Last of the Troubadours. For at his death, about the end of the thirteenth century, the final expiration of the literature and of the independent and artistically available idiom of Provence may be said to commence.