Of the enormous importance of poetry in the literary, the social, the political, and the religious life of mediæval Provence, of the variety of functions which it assumed, and the energy and success with which it did justice to each of them, the modern reader can hardly form an idea. A passage with which the troubadour Raimon Vidal opens his learned treatise on metrical art, called ‘Razos de Trobar,’ will throw some light on the intense and wide-spread love of song characterising this outburst of long pent-up feeling. ‘All Christendom,’ he says, ‘Jews and Saracens, the emperor, kings, dukes, counts and viscounts, commanders, vassals, and other knights, citizens and peasants, tall and little, daily give their minds to singing and verse-making, by either singing themselves or listening to others. No place is so deserted, or out of the way, that, as long as men inhabit it, songs are not sung either by single persons or by many together; even the shepherds in the mountains know of no greater joy than song. All good and evil things in the world are made known by the troubadours, and no evil talk, that has once been put into rhyme and verse by a troubadour, fails to be repeated every day.’ Let us now inquire into the nature of a poetry which exercised so potent a sway over all classes of society. The appearance of the first troubadour coincides very nearly with the earliest impetus of pious indignation caused by the sorrowful tales of pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre. The result was a universal rising of Christian nations, a common effort of pious revenge on the Painim, an invasion finally of the eastern by the western world, such as history has rarely witnessed. Gibbon and Chateaubriand, Hume and Joseph de Maistre, may look on the crusades in very different ways. In one thing they cannot but agree, viz., that the religious impulse of which they were the tangible result tended to remould and imbue with a new principle of life the whole of western civilisation. The only mental product of this profound revolution of feeling which concerns us here, is the idealised conception of chivalry in immediate connection with the enthusiastic movement alluded to. This idea included those others of honour, of prowess, of candour, of loyalty, which, even in modern parlance, we are wont to comprehend in the word chivalrous. But the noblest duty of the mediæval knight was his service and devotion to the lady of his heart, a feeling akin to the religious veneration of that type of immaculate womanhood which the wisdom of the Roman Church had placed on a par almost with the Deity itself. These feelings, common as they are to the mediæval poetry of all nations, were expressed with more than ordinary fervour by the knightly singers of Southern France. At the same time they appear here with so many national and individual modifications, as to impart to the study of Provençal literature, beyond the historical and philological importance