the
new spirit was born. The troubadours, wandering from castle to castle,
sang the praise of love, genuine love, the earlier ones without
admixture either of speculation or metaphysic. The dogma that pure love
was its own reward inasmuch as it made men perfect, was framed later on.

"I cannot sin when I am in her mind,"

wrote Guirot Riquier, and Dante, in the "Vita Nuova," calls his beloved
mistress "the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all virtues." The
monk Matfre Ermengau, who wrote a text-book on love, says:

Love makes good men better,
And the worst man good.

The later troubadours drew a much sharper distinction between spiritual
and sensual love. The latter was regarded as degrading and base (at
least in principle) and woe to the man who held, or rather, avowed,
another opinion. His reward was the contempt of every man and woman of
culture. "I ask no more of my mistress than that she should suffer me to
serve her," protested Bernart de Ventadour.

It goes without saying that, in spite of this high ideal, sensuality
flourished undiminished, and a troubadour who loudly sang the praise of
chastity and blatantly professed his entire disinterestedness in the
service of his mistress, did not see the least inconsequence in carrying
on a dozen intrigues at the same time with other women. Sordello, one of
the best known poets of this period, was charged by a contemporary with
having changed his mistress over a hundred times, and he himself,
impudently bragging, proclaims that

None can resist me; all the frowning husbands
Shall not prevent me to embrace their wives,
If I so wish....

Another poet, Count Rambaut III., of Orange, recommended to his
fellow-men as the surest way of winning a woman's favour, "to break her
nose with a blow of the fist." "I myself," he continued, "treat all
women with tenderness and courtesy, but then--I am considered a fool."

As may be expected, sublimated, metaphysical love was not without its
caricatures and eccentricities. One of the most grotesque figures of the
period of the troubadours was Ulrich von Lichtenstein, a German knight.
As a page, we are told, he drank the water in which his mistress had
washed her hands. Later on he had his upper lip amputated because it
displeased his lady-love, and on another occasion he cut off one of his
fingers, had it set in gold and used as a clasp on a volume of his poems
which he sent as a present to hi