isitely
artful and finished lyrical form, so adapted to the most inviting of
the perennial motives of literature that it was sure to lead to
imitation and development. It gave means and held up models to those
who were able to produce greater effects than are to be found in its
own accomplishment: yet was not its accomplishment, despite what is
called its monotony, despite its limits and its defects, other than
admirable and precious.

[Sidenote: _Some troubadours._]

The "first warbler," Count William IX. of Poitiers, has already been
mentioned, and his date fixed at exactly the first year of our period.
His chief immediate successors or contemporaries were Cercamon
("Cherchemonde," _Cursor Mundi_); the above quoted Marcabrun, who is
said to have accompanied Cercamon in his wanderings, and who has left
much more work; and Bertrand de Ventadorn or Ventadour, perhaps the
best of the group, a farmer's son of the place from which he takes his
noble-sounding name, and a professional lover of the lady thereof. Of
Jaufre (Geoffrey) Rudel of Blaye, whose love for the lady of Tripoli,
never yet seen by him, and his death at first sight of her, supply,
with the tragedy of Cabestanh and the cannibal banquet, the two most
famous pieces of Troubadour anecdotic history, we have half-a-dozen
pieces. In succession to these, Count Rambaut of Orange and Countess
Beatrice of Die keep up the reputation of the _gai saber_ as an
aristocratic employment, and the former's poem--

"Escoutatz mas no sai que s'es"

(in six-lined stanzas, rhymed _ababab_, with prose "tags" to each,
something in the manner of the modern comic song), is at least a
curiosity. The primacy of the whole school in its most flourishing
time, between 1150 and 1250, is disputed by Arnaut Daniel (a great
master of form, and as such venerated by his greater Italian pupils)
and Giraut de Bornelh, who is more fully represented in extant work
than most of his fellows, as we have more than fourscore pieces of
his. Peire or Peter Vidal, another typical troubadour, who was a
crusader, an exceedingly ingenious verse-smith, a great lover, and a
proficient in the fantastic pranks which rather brought the school
into discredit, inasmuch as he is said to have run about on all fours
in a wolfskin in honour of his mistress Loba (Lupa); Gaucelm Faidit
and Arnaut de Maroilh, Folquet of Marseilles, and Rambaut of Vaqueras;
the Monk of Montaudon and Bertrand de Born himself, who wit