150 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 



The picture of Provengal love-song presents, as must every other, 

 a bright and a repulsive side ; the one as much to be cherished and 

 praised, as is the other to be deprecated. Despite, however, its 

 licentiousness, and it is great ; despite its immoral allusions, and 

 they are not a few ; despite the chilling objections which critics 

 have delighted to heap upon it, the amatory poetry of the Trouba- 

 dours presents to the student an inexhaustable fund of instruction 

 and delight. Emboldened by a common sentiment — urged on by 

 the same cause — the Troubadours presented an irresistible phalanx 

 to the further encroachments of barbarism ; and the briefest survey 

 of the state of society before their advent and after their fall, will 

 authorize us in hailing their existence, as a brilliant triumph in the 

 great cause of man. In our joy at the impulse which their senti- 

 ments of love imparted to mankind, we can overlook the excesses 

 into which it hurried them ; and we can bear in mind that its evil 

 influence was soon remedied, but that the good has never ceased. 

 In a word the passion of the Troubadours, licentious and ungoverned 

 as it was, first imparted to modern Europe the breath of intellectual 

 life ; first displayed the harmonizing and irresistible efi'ects of its 

 cultivation ; and first presented the master key, with which to 

 unlock the fetters which for more than ten centuries had restrained 

 the mind. Nor was this all-powerful engine to be resisted ; before 

 its influence man's chains were destined to drop off*, and he himself 

 to proceed exulting in the glorious track of honour, and liberty, 

 and glory, and power. The tide of mental cultivation, once a- 

 roused, flowed on with rapid and increasing steps; the gentle 

 stream which had been aroused by the Troubadours, was, by their 

 successors, transformed into the boiling torrent, which, still dashing 

 onwards, spurned every obstacle, and hurried the barrier and its 

 builder to the same destruction. The mind was thus irresistibly 

 impelled to improvement, and uniting refinement to gallantry, 

 burst forth, as does the sun from the clouds, which have for a time 

 obscured him in a dazzling galaxy of brilliancy, excellence, and 

 power. 



CRITES. 



(To he continued.) 



