236 CHAUCER. 



Trouveres, and the Italians. It is only the two latter 

 who can fairly claim any immediate influence in the 

 direction of his thought or the formation of his style. 

 The only Latin poet who can be supposed to have in 

 fluenced the spirit of mediaeval literature is Ovid. In 

 his sentimentality, his love of the marvellous and the 

 picturesque, he is its natural precursor. The analogy 

 between his Fasti and the versified legends of saints is 

 more than a fanciful one. He was certainly popular 

 with the poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen 

 turies. Virgil had wellnigh become mythical. The 

 chief merit of the Prove^al poets is in having been the 

 first to demonstrate that it was possible to write with 

 elegance in a modern dialect, and their interest for us is 

 mainly as forerunners, as indications of tendency. Their 

 literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. Its formal senti 

 ment culminated in Laura, its ideal aspiration in Bea 

 trice. Shakespeare's hundred and sixth sonnet, if, for the 

 imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed, we substi 

 tute the muse of a truer conception and more perfected 

 utterance, represents exactly the feeling with which we 

 read Proven9al poetry : 



" When in the chronicle of wasted Time 

 I see descriptions of the fairest wights 

 And beauty making beautiful old rhyme 

 In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, 



I see their antique pen -would have expressed 



Even such a beauty as you master now ; 



So all their praises are but prophecies 



Of this our time, all yovr prefiguring, 



And, for they looked but with divining eyes, 



They had not skill enough your worth to sing." 



It is astonishing how little of the real life of the time we 

 learn from the Troubadours except by way of inference 

 and deduction. Their poetry is purely lyric in its most 

 narrow sense, that is, the expression of personal and 



