justice stopped a while when she fled
from the towns of Antiquity.

[1] The reader may oppose to my views the existence of the--class of
poems, French, Latin, and German, of which the Provencal Pastourela is
the original type, and which represent the courting, by the poet, who
is, of course, a knight, of a beautiful country-girl, who is shown us as
feeding her sheep or spinning with her distaff. But these poems are, to
the best of my knowledge, all of a single pattern, and extremely
insincere and artificial in tone, that I feel inclined to class them
with the pastorals--Dresden china idylls by men who had never looked a
live peasant in the face--of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
--as distant descendants from the pastoral poetry of antiquity, of which
the chivalric poets may have got some indirect notions as they did of
the antique epics. It is moreover extremely the likely that these love
poems, in which, successfully or unsuccessfully, the poet usually offers
a bribe to the woman of low degree, conceal beneath the conventional
pastoral trappings the intrigues of minnesingers and troubadours with
women of the small artizan or village proprietor class. The real peasant
woman--the female of the villain--could scarcely have been above the
notice of the noblemen's servants; and, in countries where the
seigneurial rights were in vigour, would scarcely have been offered
presents and fine words. As regards the innumerable poems against the
peasantry, I may refer the reader to an extremely curious publication of
"Carmina Medii AEvi," recently made by Sig. Francesco Novati, and which
contains, besides a selection of specimens, a list of references on the
subject of poems "De Natura Rusticorum." One of the satirical
declensions runs as follows:

Singulariter. Pluraliter.
Nom. Hic villanus. Nom. Hi maledicti.
Gen. Huius rustici. Gen. Horum tristium.
Dat. Huic tferfero (_sic_). Dat. His mendacibus.
Acc. Hunc furem. Acc. Hos nequissimos.
Voc. O latro. Voc. O pessimi.
Abl. Ab hoc depredatore. Abl. Ab his infidelibus.

The accusation of heresy and of crucifying Christ is evidently
due to the devil-worship prevalent among the serfs, and is thus,
alluded to in a north Italian poem, probably borrowed from the
French:

Christo fo da villan crucifio,
E stagom sempre in pi