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AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF FRENCH 

 LITERATURE. 



v.— ON THE LOVE-SONGS OF THE TROUBADOURS. 



" He saide hee loved, and was beloved nothing ; 



Of swich matere, made hee many layes, 



Songes, complaintes, roundels, virelayes ; 



How that he durst not his sorwe telle, 



But languisheth as dothe a furie in helle ; 



And die he must, he said, as did Ecco 



For Narcissus, that durst not tell here woe." 



Chaucer, FranJcele'mes Tale. 



Varied as are the productions of the Provencal bards, the most 

 exalted and conspicuous station in their poesy must undoubtedly be 

 assigned to their love songs. The influence of woman, which, under 

 their Roman conquerors, they had slighted and disowned, was now, 

 under their Gothic rulers, acknowledged in its most despotic shape. 

 Love, as an idol, reigned supreme, and before his shrine were freely 

 lavished those feelings of reverence and of veneration which ought 

 to be excited only by the contemplation of an Heavenly One. De- 

 spite, however, this impassioned and ill-directed fervour, despite the 

 laxity of morals which so peculiarly distinguished the age, it must 

 be allowed that these outpourings of uncultivated genius were of 

 unquestionable utility in an age of darkness and of oppression, when 

 the superior trampled with despotic violence on the inferior, when 

 feudalism was dominant, and when a long-continued system of ser- 

 vitude had degraded and brutalized mankind. The joyous strains of 

 the Troubadours naturally elicited corresponding feelings of tender- 

 ness and love, and thus, arousing man's mental faculties from the 

 degrading lethargy in which they had so long and so inertly slum- 

 bered, awakened him to a sense of his innate might, inspired him 

 with new wants and new affections, evinced the value of social en- 

 joyments and relations, and finally, by leading him from the dark 

 and lowering aspect of the present, to the bright and airy vistas of 

 the future, demonstrated the benefits of mental refinement and 

 cultivation. 



. The love poems of the Proven9als, though they present a profu- 

 sion, possess but little real sentiment. It has also, with some show 

 of justice, been objected to these compositions, that they are replete 

 with the same ideas, that the same images and the same metaphors 



