y absolute sureness;
and if he desires to supplement them with the work of a single author,
that of Thibaut of Champagne or Navarre,[128] which is easily
accessible, will form an excellent third.

[Footnote 125: M. Jeanroy, as is also the case with other writers of
monographs mentioned in this chapter, has contributed to M. Petit de
Julleville's _Histoire_ (_v._ p. 23) on his subject.]

[Footnote 126: Paris, 1833.]

[Footnote 127: Leipzig, 1870.]

[Footnote 128: Rheims, 1851.]

[Sidenote: _The_ Romance _and the_ Pastourelle.]

In this northern lyric--that is to say, northern as compared with
Provencal[129]--we find all or almost all the artificial forms which
are characteristic of Provencal itself, some of them no doubt rather
sisters than daughters of their analogues in the _langue d'oc_.
Indeed, at the end of our present period, and still more later, the
ingenuity of the _trouveres_ seems to have pushed the strictly formal,
strictly artificial part of the poetry of the troubadours to almost
its furthest possible limits in varieties of _triolet_ and _rondeau_,
_ballade_ and _chant royal_. But the _Romances_ and the _Pastourelles_
stand apart from these, and both are recognised by authorities among
the troubadours themselves as specially northern forms. The
differentia of each is in subject rather than in form, the "romance"
in this sense being a short love-story, with little more than a single
incident in it sometimes, but still always possessing an incident; the
_Pastourelle_, a special variety of love-story of the kind so
curiously popular in all mediaeval languages, and so curiously alien
from modern experience, where a passing knight sees a damsel of low
degree, and woos her at once, with or without success, or where two
personages of the shepherd kind sue and are sued with evil hap or
good. In other words, the "romance" is supremely presented in English,
and in the much-abused fifteenth century, by the _Nut-Browne Maid_,
the "pastourelle" by Henryson's _Robene and Makyne_. Perhaps there is
nothing quite so good as either in the French originals of both;
certainly there is nothing like the union of metrical felicity,
romantic conduct, sweet but not mawkish sentiment, and never-flagging
interest in the anonymous masterpiece which the ever-blessed Arnold
preserved for us in his _Chronicle_. But the diffused merits--the
so-to-speak "class-merits"--of the poems in general are very high
indeed: and when the best