ls he needed, if he did not know how to
make them. The scops and scalds were groping for the very pattern of
the tools themselves.

The _langue d'oc_, first of all vernacular tongues, borrowed from
Latin, as Latin had borrowed from Greek, such of the practical
outcomes of the laws of lyric harmony in Aryan speech as were suitable
to itself; and passed the lesson on to the _trouveres_ of the north of
France--if indeed these did not work out the transfer for themselves
almost independently. And as there was much more northern admixture,
and in particular a less tyrannous softness of vowel-ending in the
_langue d'oil_, this second stage saw a great increase of suppleness,
a great emancipation from monotony, a wonderful freshness and wealth
of colour and form. It has been said, and I see no reason to alter the
saying, that the French tongue in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
was actually better suited for lyrical poetry, and did actually
produce lyrical poetry, as far as prosody is concerned, of a fresher,
freer, more spontaneous kind, from the twelfth century to the
beginning of the fifteenth than has ever been the case since.[124]

[Footnote 124: This is not inconsistent with allowing that no single
French lyric poet is the equal of Walther von der Vogelweide, and that
the exercises of all are hampered by the lack--after the earliest
examples--of trisyllabic metres.]

M. Alfred Jeanroy has written a learned and extensive monograph on
_Les Origines de la Poesie Lyrique en France_, which with M. Gaston
Raynaud's _Bibliographie des Chansonniers Francais_, and his
collection of _Motets_ of our present period, is indispensable to the
thorough student of the subject.[125] But for general literary
purposes the two classics of the matter are, and are long likely to
be, the charming _Romancero Francais_[126] which M. Paulin Paris
published in the very dawn of the study of mediaeval literature in
France, and the admirable _Romanzen und Pastourellen_[127] which Herr
Karl Bartsch collected and issued a quarter of a century ago. Here as
elsewhere the piecemeal system of publication which has been the bane
of the whole subject is to be regretted, for with a little effort and
a little division of labour the entire _corpus_ of French lyric from
the tenth to the fourteenth century might have been easily set before
the public. But the two volumes above mentioned will enable the reader
to judge its general characteristics with prett