ng 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.

Of the two divisions, the former yields by far the livelier image of
the men we have to deal with. It will therefore form the staple of my
argument. The latter blends at so many points with medieval literature
of the monastic kind, that it is chiefly distinguished by boldness of
censure and sincerity of invective. In these qualities the serious
poems of the Goliardi, emanating from a class of men who moved behind
the scenes and yet were free to speak their thoughts, are unique.
Written with the satirist's eye upon the object of his sarcasm, tinged
with the license of his vagabondage, throbbing with the passionate and
nonchalant afflatus of the wine-cup, they wing their flight like
poisoned arrows or plumed serpents with unerring straightness at
abuses in high places.

The wide space occupied by Nature in the secular poems of the Goliardi