h Peire
Cardinal is the chief satirist (though the satire of the two takes
different forms); Guillem Figueira, the author of a long invective
against Rome, and Sordello of mysterious and contingent fame,--are
other chief members, and of some of them we have early, perhaps
contemporary, _Lives_, or at least anecdotes. For instance, the
Cabestanh or Cabestaing story comes from these. The last name of
importance in our period, if not the last of the right troubadours, is
usually taken to be that of Guiraut Riquier.

[Sidenote: _Criticism of Provencal._]

It would scarcely be fair to say that the exploit attributed to
Rambaut of Vaqueras, a poet of the very palmiest time, at the juncture
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--that of composing a poem in
lines written successively in three different forms of Provencal
(_langue d'oc_ proper, Gascon, and Catalan), in _langue d'oil_, and in
Italian, with a _coda_ line jumbled up of all five--is a final
criticism at once of the merits and the defects of this literature.
But it at least indicates the lines of such a criticism. By its
marvellous suppleness, sweetness, and adaptation to the verbal and
metrical needs of poetry, Provencal served--in a fashion probably
impossible to the stiffer if more virile tongues--as an example in
point of form to these tongues themselves: and it achieved, at the
same time with a good deal of mere gymnastic, exercises in form of the
most real and abiding beauty. But it had as a language too little
character of its own, and was too fatally apt to shade into the other
languages--French on the one hand, Spanish and Italian on the
other--with which it was surrounded, and to which it was akin. And
coming to perfection at a time when no modern thought was distinctly
formed, when positive knowledge was at a low ebb, and when it had
neither the stimulus of vigorous national life nor the healthy
occupation of what may be called varied literary business, it tended
to become, on the whole, too much of a plaything merely. Now, schools
and playgrounds are both admirable things, and necessary to man; but
what is done in both is only an exercise or a relaxation from
exercise. Neither man nor literature can stay either in class-room or
playing-field for ever, and Provencal had scarcely any other places of
abode to offer.

CHAPTER IX.

THE LITERATURE OF THE PENINSULAS.

LIMITATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER. LATE GREEK ROMANCE. ITS
DIFFICULTIES AS