292 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF FRENCH LITERATURE. 
which we shudder, and crimes which “harrow up the soul ;’ and 
yet these are the manners and customs of the “good old times,” 
which we still love to recal, and in recalling to regret. 
Their didactic pieces are few in number, and much limited in their 
scope and tendency. Some few comprise maxims of universal mora- 
lity ; the greater part, however, contain instructions for the benefit of 
the different classes of society, to the candidates for knighthood, to 
the ladies, the poets, and the Jongleurs, detailing the path which each 
is to tread in order to attain pleasure, profit, or renown. Some of 
their moral sketches may be ranked among their happiest efforts ; 
and we find that the tedium of continual advice is enlivened by occa- 
sional gaiety, and in some few instances rendered still more agreeable 
by the beauties of fiction. 
Their pastorals are, as we have before mentioned, few in number, 
and in composition very inferior. And certainly, though few styles 
of ,poetry have attracted more writers than the pastoral, how few of 
them (even in modern times) deserve to be ranked higher than as 
mere imitators ?* The pastoral descriptions and metaphors used by 
Theocritus, have been used as hereditary property by all succeeding 
poets ; and the allusions and similies of the old Sicilian meet us again 
in the works of most of his poetical successors. If, then, even now, 
we fail in this species of composition, we cannot be surprised at its 
inferiority among the Provengals, whose style of living and manner 
of thinking were so totally averse to it. 
A more enlarged account of their productions, as also a brief his- 
tory of some of the more celebrated Troubadours, we will reserve for 
a future article. 
CRITES. 
* One of the best treatises on pastoral poetry is to be found in the Ram- 
bler, where, describing the pleasures arising from a country life, he says, 
“The sense of this universal pleasure has invited numbers without number to 
try their skill in pastoral performances, in which they have generally suc- 
ceeded after the manner of other imitators, transmitting the same images 
in the same combination from one to another, till he that reads the title of a 
poem may guess at the whole series of the composition.” 
(To be continued ). 
