In Spain, we are further told, these things are managed better; musicians and mountebanks and poets have each a name of their own, and nobody can mistake the one for the other. A similar distinction the king now proposes for the domain of the _langue d’oc_, and for that purpose divides the whole poetic community into three classes. First and lowest are named the people who would not dare to show themselves at court, and who hang about taverns and village-greens, showing off the tricks of learned dogs and goats, imitating birds’ voices, or singing coarse songs. These in future are to be called by the Italian word ‘_bufos_,’ ‘as is the custom in Lombardy.’ Different from these are the musicians and reciters of stories who contribute to the amusement of the nobles by these arts or other agreeable pastimes. These, and these alone, ought to claim the name of ‘_joglars_,’ and they ought to be received at court and liberally remunerated according to their merits. The third and highest class comprises those who possess the gift of composing verses and melodies, and for that reason are entitled to the name of _inventores_, which, as the king remarks, is the Latin equivalent of the vernacular _trobadors_. But a last and highest distinction is reserved for those amongst the poets who combine the useful with the agreeable, and in the sweet rhymes of their canzos enforce moral and religious maxims. These are in future to be called _doctors de trobar_, doctors of poetry; for, adds the king, who is fond of etymology and not wholly averse to a pun: ... Car doctrinar Sabon ben qui’ls enten. Whether the degree was ever conferred remains uncertain. It is obvious that the creating of twenty doctors of poetry would not make one poet. At the same time if a man or men of high poetic gifts had arisen, the improved social position intended for them would have been a gain and an encouragement. But it is a melancholy fact that what seems most spontaneous and involuntary in man—genius—obeys, after all, the universal rules of supply and demand, and that when once literary vitality and literary interest are departed from a nation it is hopeless to galvanise the corpse with artificial life. Guiraut’s scheme in itself is therefore hardly worth mentioning. But it is interesting as a symptom of the same tendency of the age towards mixing up poetry with scholarship which soon afterwards led to the institution of Academies, and Jeux Floraux, and Poet-Laureateships, and traces of which have survived till the present day in Provence and elsewhere. CHAPTER VIII. TRACES OF POPULAR SONG IN THE POETRY OF THE TROUBADOURS.—THE PASTORELA.