cipal monuments are a few charters, a translation of part of St.
John's Gospel, and several religious pieces in prose and verse. Not
till the extreme end of this century does the Troubadour begin to make
himself heard. The earliest of these minstrels whose songs we possess is
William IX, Count of Poitiers. With him Provencal literature, properly
so called, begins.

[Sidenote: Periods of Provencal Literature.]

The admirable historian of Provencal literature, Karl Bartsch, divides
its products into three periods; the first reaching to the end of the
eleventh century, and comprising the beginnings and experiments of the
language as a literary medium; the second covering the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, the most flourishing time of the Troubadour
poetry, and possessing also specimens of many other forms of literary
composition; the third, the period of decadence, including the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and remarkable chiefly for some
religious literature, and for the contests of the Toulouse school of
poets. In a complete history of Provencal literature notice would also
have to be taken of the fitful and spasmodic attempts of the last four
centuries to restore the dialect to the rank of a literary language,
attempts which have never been made with greater energy and success than
in our own time[49], but which hardly call for notice here.

[Sidenote: First Period.]

The most remarkable works of the first period have been already alluded
to. This period may possibly have produced original epics of the Chanson
form, though, as has been pointed out, no indications of any such exist,
except in the solitary instance of _Girartz de Rossilho_. The important
poem of Auberi of Besancon on Alexander is lost, except the first
hundred verses. It is thought to be the oldest vernacular poem on the
subject, and is in a mixed dialect partaking of the forms both of north
and south. Hymns, sometimes in mixed Latin and Provencal, sometimes
entirely in the latter, are found early. A single prose monument remains
in the shape of a fragmentary translation of the Gospel of St. John. But
by far the most important example of this period is the _Boethius_. The
poem, as we have it, extends to 238 decasyllabic verses arranged on the
fashion of a Chanson de Geste, and dates from the eleventh century, or
at latest from the beginning of the twelfth, but is thought to be a
rehandling of another poem which may have been written nearly tw