A little more smoothly, although by no means amicably, do matters proceed between Rambaut de Vaqueiras and Count Albert di Malaspina, an unruly Italian nobleman. The cause of their quarrel is a certain lady of Tortona, who, after having flirted with the troubadour, jilted him for the count. The latter, adding insult to injury, taunts Rambaut with his loss in the opening stanza. The troubadour retorts with a charge of highway-robbery, which the nobleman frankly admits, explaining, however, that ‘many a time, I can assure you, I have taken goods from a wish to make presents, and not in order to enrich myself or heap up treasures.’ In the further course of the poem, the nobleman ridicules the poverty of the poet and his ambition in having aspired to knighthood, to which neither his courage nor his position entitled him. The troubadour, in return, accuses Albert of every crime under the sun, including perjury and treachery in love and politics. As to cowardice he says: ‘If I am not exactly an Oliver in the use of arms, it appears to me that you are no Roland either.’ In this manner the quarrel continues for some time, without much apparent superiority on either side, a fact which redounds greatly to the credit of the Italian count. For Rambaut was an experienced poet and a renowned champion in the literary warfare of those days. CHAPTER XIII. THE SIRVENTES. The formal principle on which the division in the earlier chapters has been made must henceforth be abandoned entirely. The two great classes of poetry to which we now must turn, and which comprise by far the greater portion of Provençal literature, the _sirventes_ and the _canzo_, have no metrical scheme inherent in either of them as an essential part of their kind. The same infinite variety of rhyme and metre and stanza is found in the one as well as in the other. They can be separated, therefore, according to the subject-matter alone; and on this ground a division is easy enough, and satisfactory, at least as far as one of the two branches is concerned. The _canzo_, it may briefly be said, is a lyrical poem which treats of love, and a _sirventes_ one which does not. To the further definition of the latter somewhat negative term we must now devote our attention for a little while. A few general remarks on the character of the poetry of the troubadours, distinguishing it from all other mediæval schools, may aptly precede this, the most important section of the present work.