With regard to the form and diction of the _Carmina Vagorum_, it is enough to say two things at the present time. First, a large portion of these pieces, including a majority of the satires and longer descriptive poems, are composed in measures borrowed from hymnology, follow the diction of the Church, and imitate the double-rhyming rhythms of her sequences. It is not unnatural, this being the case, that parodies of hymns should be comparatively common. Of these I shall produce some specimens in the course of this study. Secondly, those which do not exhibit popular hymn measures are clearly written for melodies, some of them very complicated in structure, suggesting part-songs and madrigals, with curious interlacing of long and short lines, double and single rhymes, recurrent ritournelles, and so forth. The ingenuity with which these poets adapted their language to the exigencies of the tune, taxing the fertility of Latin rhymes, and setting off the long sonorous words to great advantage, deserves admiring comment. At their best, it is almost impossible to reproduce in English the peculiar effects of their melodic artifices. But there is another side to the matter. At their worst, these Latin lyrics, moulded on a tune, degenerate into disjointed verbiage, sound and adaptation to song prevailing over sense and satisfaction to the mind. It must, however, be remembered that such lyrics, sometimes now almost unintelligible, have come down to us with a very mutilated text, after suffering the degradations through frequent oral transmission to which popular poetry is peculiarly liable. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 14: The more I study the songs of love and wine in this codex, the more convinced am I that they have their origin for the most part in South-Western Germany, Bavaria, the Bodensee, and Elsass.] IX. It is easier to say what the Goliardi wrote about than who the writers were, and what they felt and thought than by what names they were baptised. The mass of their literature, as it is at present known to us, divides into two broad classes. The one division includes poems on the themes of vagabond existence, the truant life of these capricious students; on spring-time and its rural pleasure; on love in many phases and for divers kinds of women; lastly, on wine and on the dice-box. The other division is devoted to graver topics; to satires on society, touching especially the Roman Court, and criticising eminent ecclesiastics in all countries; to moral dissertations, and to discourses on the brevity of life.