can be spared here, and would hardly be in place
if it were otherwise. All such prosodies tend rather to the childish,
as when, for instance, the _pastorela_, or shepherdess poem in
general, was divided into _porquiera_, _cabreira_, _auqueira_, and
other things, according as the damsel's special wards were pigs or
goats or geese. Perhaps the most famous, peculiar, and representative
of Provencal forms are the _alba_, or poem of morning parting, and the
_sirvente_, or poem _not_ of love. The _sestina_, a very elaborate
canzonet, was invented in Provence and borrowed by the Italians. But
it is curious to find that the sonnet, the crown and flower of all
artificial poetry, though certainly invented long before the decadence
of Provencal, was only used in Provencal by Italian experimenters. The
poets proper of the _langue d'oc_ were probably too proud to admit any
form that they had not invented themselves.

[Footnote 179: The _Grundriss zur Geschichte der Provenzalischen
Literatur_ (Elberfeld, 1872) and the _Chrestomathie Provencale_ (3d
ed., Elberfeld, 1875) of this excellent scholar will not soon be
obsolete, and may, in the peculiar conditions of the case, suffice all
but special students in a degree hardly possible in any other
literature. Mahn's _Troubadours_ and the older works of Raynouard and
Fauriel are the chief storehouses of wider information, and separate
editions of the works of the chief poets are being accumulated by
modern, chiefly German, scholars. An interesting and valuable addition
to the _English_ literature of the subject has been made, since the
text was written, by Miss Ida Farnell's _Lives of the Troubadours_, a
translation with added specimens of the poets and other editorial
matter.]

[Sidenote: _Many men, one mind._]

Next in noteworthiness to the variety of form of the Provencal poets
is their number. Even the multitude of _trouveres_ and Minnesingers
dwindles beside the list of four hundred and sixty named poets, for
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries only, which Bartsch's list
contains; some, it is true, credited with only a single piece, but
others with ten, twenty, fifty, or even close to a hundred, not to
mention an anonymous appendix of over two hundred and fifty poems
more. Great, however, as is the bulk of this division of literature,
hardly any has more distinct and uniform--its enemies may say more
monotonous--characteristics. It is not entirely composed of
love-poetry; but th