of the novels written for our grandmothers, love was still the moving power of all human action: inflated sentiment, conventional feeling, and the exaggerated woes and joys of love remained the current coin of this domain of literature, and passed for more than they were worth. The popular meaning of the words-romantic and romancing—will remain an evidence, as long as the language lasts, of the length these compositions went in their abuse of public credulity and public taste.

The productions of the jougleurs, their ballads, and outward pictures of stirring life, which were intended for the unsophisticated taste of the lower orders, have proved more natural, and far more suitable to the permanent taste of all classes, than the sentimental and lyrical pieces of their supposed superiors. It may appear at first sight, that the jougleur is but the counterpart of the scald, and his ballads, romances, chansons de gestes, the equivalents of the saga, only adapted to a different and more advanced state of society; being objective poetry in contradistinction to the subjective poetry of the troubadour. But, on closer examination, we find this essential difference. Narrative, exploit, adventure, real or imaginary, persons and actions, are common to the compositions of both. But those of the scald are purely objective, and without reference to cause or result, to consistency or inconsistency of action or character, — without reflection, or sentiment, or moral from actor or author. Action only is related by him. While in those of the jougleur the objective is always subservient to the subjective. His story is a romance of love, or of piety, or of knightly gallantry and devotedness to the lady or saint, or to his own fame and honour. It is sentiment in boots and spurs.

The troubadours and trouvères appear to have been in their most flourishing state about the last half of the twelfth century. Attended by their jougleurs, they were then the favoured guests of kings and nobles. Besides the country on either side of the Loire, they frequented Piedmont, Tuscany, Lombardy, Catalonia, and Aragon. About 1152 they visited Normandy and England. In 1162 they received Frederick I. at Turin, who repaid them by his praises of lo cantar Provensallès. A little later, the marriage of king Emerick with Constance, daughter of Alphonso II., raised up a friendly court in Hungary. But in Germany the court language was different: and the public favour was pre-occupied by an equivalent class, the minnesängers, of a ruder taste but much more natural. Against these obstacles the elaborate refinements of the troubadour poetry could make but feeble way. Within their own provinces, however, the troubadours of this age reigned supreme. They had meetings and societies, like those of the knights at

tournaments, for determining their own merits, and questions in love and poesy; and the Arcadian academies still lingering in Italy, in which laurel crowns are awarded for poetical affectations, are derived from the similar institutions of the troubadours and trouvères at Thoulouse, Puy Sainte Marie, and Cambray. The compositions celebrated at those meetings were poems of chivalrous love and sentimental gallantry, pastorals, serenades, aubades, and [such lyric effusions as suited, and indeed were only intelligible to, an artificial sensibility created by what it fed on. These alone were dignified with the character of verse. Epic compositions, although in metre, were called prose. Dante, in speaking of the shade of the troubadour, Arnaud Daniel, proclaims his superiority to all other troubadours in every kind of composition:

'Versi d' amore e prose di romanzi,

Soverchio tutti e lascia dir gli sciocchi,
Che quel di Limosin credon che avanzi ;'

and M. Fauriel informs us that the word prosa is still applied, in some parts of the south of France, to ballads, and poems of action really in verse. The Limousin poet, whom Dante says fools prefer to Arnaud Daniel, is Guiraud de Borneil. Dante, in another work, De Vulgari Eloquio,' calls the three troubadours, Arnaud Daniel, Guiraud de Borneil, and Bertran de Born, three most illustrious poets in three different ways-circa quæ sola (scilicet armorum probitatem, amoris ascensionem, et directionem voluntatis) si bene recolimus, illustres viros invenimus vulgariter poetasse, scilicet, Beltramum de Bornio arma, Arnaldum Danielum amorem, Giraldum de Bornello rectitudinem. This triumvirate of illustrious troubadours flourished between 1175 and 1220. Petrarch calls Arnauld Daniel, the great master of love-ranking Arnaud de Marveil, as il men famoso Arnoldo. According to Benvenuto d'Imola, he borrowed from him and not from Dante, one of his forms of versification a quo, scilicet Arnaldo Danielo, Petrarcha fatebatur sponte se accepisse modum et stilum cantilenæ de quatuor rythmis, non a Dante. He was the inventor of sextines. The merit, however, of this first of troubadours consisted, according to M. Diez, in exaggerated expression of sentiment, far-fetched allusion, and difficult rhymes and forms of verse: what remains of him is so poor, that Sismondi thinks his best pieces must have been lost. There was something, however, in the mind of Petrarch congenial to such a school. We find the parallel to his love for Laura in the still more exaggerated passion of the troubadour, Jaufre Rudal, prince of Blaya, about 1170, for a countess of Tripolis, whom

he had never seen. He knew her only from the reports of pilgrims, who, on their return from Antioch, were full of the praises of her goodness and beauty. Nothing daunted, he assumed the cross from a desire to set eyes on the unseen object of his ardent love; embarked, and arrived at Tripolis- but only to see her, and expire in the extasy of his fantastic passion! Emotion, sentiment, and passion, it may however be observed, may be very real and intense, even when not natural. They are not less strong because they are nourished by imagination. If acquired tastes and habits obtain the greatest influence over our physical constitution, we may expect to find our intellectual constitution submitting to the same law. An acquired spirit, tone, or school of feeling and thinking, which all men of equal culture in all ages cannot enter into and sympathise with, can scarcely be considered natural. It may, nevertheless, be very powerful and enduring; though pretty sure to run itself out, lose itself in a waste, or end in the ridiculous. About the end of the twelfth century, the obscure, mystical, and excessive in sentiment and expression, had apparently reached this goal. Guiraud de Borneil, the one least praised above by Dante and who flourished about 1180, began in the obscure style; but he had afterwards the sense to renounce it, and defend the simple and intelligible. He ventured to assert that a lay has no merit if all the world cannot understand it, and that an easy, simple lay conceals more art than it displays.' He vindicated his reformed faith against his friend Ignaura, who maintained, in a tenzone, the superiority of the obscure.

6

Bertran de Born, the third in Dante's triumvirate of illustrious troubadours, was a warrior as well as a poet; and although his baronial chateau and territory were unimportant, he was, by force of individual character, an historical personage. Sismondi calls him the Tyrtæus of the Middle Ages: To him, and his influence over the young prince Henry, son of our Henry II., are ascribed the feuds and wars between the son and father, which began in 1172 and only ended when the prince died of a fever in 1183;-full of sorrow and remorse for his conduct to a father, to whom he was preparing to give battle when he fell ill. Bertran de Born is placed in hell by Dante, and is represented carrying his head in his hand by way of lantern, as a fit punishment for having divided the son and father by his pernicious counsels. He appears to have lived on an intimate footing with the sons of Henry II.; for, in his poems, the usual name he gives Prince Henry is 'Marinier,' the sailor. Godfrey of Brittany he calls Rassa,' a nickname of which the meaning is not known; and Richard, 'Oc e no,'

or Yes and no,'-the only meaning of which is scarcely reconcileable with his world-wide title of the Lion's Heart.* Bertran de Born wrote Sirventes or satires and invocations to war, as well as Canzoni or lays of love; while in his life he represented the bold, restless, unprincipled baron of the twelfth century. Holding his petty castle as proudly and stoutly as kings held their kingdoms, and caring little for their pleasure or displeasure, he was ready, by his sword and song, to incur either, with an indifference which a well-earned self-confidence and a disjointed state of society alone could give. It was the high and palmy state of the troubadours when Bertran de Born, Sire de Hautefort, wrote political satires against Alphonso II. of Aragon, and defended his chateau against Henry II. of England.

During the succeeding hundred years the social influence of the troubadours was on the wane. Guirant Riquier, who lived between 1250 and 1294, laments the decline of his order in public estimation: the troubadours were now confounded with jougleurs and buffoons; and in a poem of the year 1278 he complains

'so little is the noble art of poesy now esteemed, that it is scarcely desired, tolerated, or listened to.' But it was probably the advance not the decline of public taste and of society in Europe, which was gradually leaving behind it the troubadours and their poetry. From the breaking up of the estates of the nobles ruined by the expense of the Crusades, new classes had sprung up, and a greater diffusion of property. The magnificent order of barons with extensive territories, surrounded in their castles by a little court, and indulging in the forced tastes and ostentatious puerilities, in which power so often seeks a privilege or resource, was almost extinguished; while smaller proprietors, whose tastes were not formed in any exclusive school, began to fill the enlarging ranks. The jougleur, who always at least made himself understood, would now naturally become a favourite, rather than the dark, inflated, and lyrical troubadour. The trouvères of the north of the Loire and of Flanders appear in general to have preferred what was intelligible, to the mystical obscurity of the troubadours: they cultivated the fabliaux more than the canzone: perhaps the greater diffusion of wealth and property brought in by the early commerce of the low countries, and the different class of patrons

Sismondi has published two copies of a sirvente by Richard I., A. D. 1193, in the second year of his captivity. One copy is in the langue d'oc; the other in the langue d'oil. Whether one or both are originals, or neither, nobody of course can say.

raised up by this diffusion, may account for the difference. M. Dinaux, speaking of the difference between the compositions of the trouvères of Flanders and the troubadours of Provence, says:

'Ces derniers chantaient constamment le printemps, les fleurs, se lançaient dans les régions étherées à l'aide d'un style boursouflé, et ne sortaient guères d'un cercle d'idées: les trouvères, au contraire, plus naturels, meilleurs peintres de l'époque, chantaient, ou plutôt contaient bourgeoisement l'anecdote du jour, les mœurs du couvent, les aventures d'amour, enfin tous les plaisirs de la vie, et de la société : les troubadours étaient les classiques exaggérés du moyen âge; les trouvères en furent les romantiques raisonnables. Il résulte de là que les uns deviennent parfois noblement ennuyeux, tandis que l'allure franche et roturiere des autres plaît et amuse presque toujours.'

The trouvères, in short, had adopted more of the objective style than the troubadours. They would have been classed by the latter, in their most palmy state, with their jougleurs. The influence, by which the petty courts of the twelfth century created and supported an artificial taste in poetry, is very similar to the subsequent influence of the court of Louis XIV. on French literature. Both confined thinking and feeling in composition within a certain conventional circle, beyond which even genius must not venture. Within this conventional circle very gifted men, no doubt, thought—and felt-and wrote: but still they were hemmed in by arbitrary restraints; and in every form of poetry, especially in the drama, they were almost compelled to be noblement ennuyeux. The French mind is only now beginning to overstep this chalk circle. But the voice is gone forth; natural feeling and expression have been heard; and the conceits, exaggerated sentiments, far-fetched allusions, and mystical obscurity of the lyrics of Arnaud Daniel, Guiraud de Borneil, and Bertran de Born, though once admired by Dante and still recommended by M. Fauriel, will scarcely revive a taste for the poetry of the Provençal troubadours.

ART. II. - The History of Egypt from the Earliest Times till the Conquest by the Arabs, A. D. 640. By SAMUEL SHARPE. London: 1846.

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AD this been the work of a German professor, printed on dingy paper, and with the usual amount of references in close type, it would probably ere now have been translated, or adapted for the English market. As a home-production we are therefore disposed to give it friendly welcome. Its subject is