152 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



"Thy ministers rob here and murder there, 

 And o'er thy sheep a wolf has shepherd's care," 



sang Walther von der Vogelweide, the Minnesinger of 

 Germany: and the troubadours in France echo the same 

 strain in even fiercer invective under the Arabian influence 

 from across the Pyrenees, couching their denunciations in 

 the new and flowing rhythms learned from the same source. 



Among the troubadours was Guyot de Provins, 1 a min- 

 strel, who, like the great Minnesinger, wandered from 

 court to court singing his lays, and who had followed the 

 Templars in the Crusades. Becoming tired of the world, 

 or, perhaps, his world tiring of him, he entered the Cis- 

 tercian novitiate, but abandoned that order in favor of the 

 Cluniacenses, and then repented his choice and sought to 

 return to his first association. The result was an increase 

 in the jealousy between the two orders, and finally a trian- 

 gular contest in which Guyot stood aloof and poured out 

 upon both of them the vials of his wrathful sarcasm in gall 

 and wormwood, none the less biting because of his inti- 

 mate knowledge of monastic secrets. 



The principal satire written by Guyot is entitled 

 " Bible," as common a name for productions of the sort as 

 De Natura Rerum was for encyclopaedic treatises. It is 

 a long poem of some 2,700 lines, written between the years 

 1203 and 1208, and it brings all sorts and conditions of men 

 under the lash, beginning with monarchs and ending with 

 u theologues, priests and physicians." 



The second book is devoted to the clergy, and opens 

 with a criticism of the Pope himself. It might well be 

 supposed that such startling audacity would have brought 

 the earthly pilgrimage of the writer to an abrupt conclu- 

 sion ; but Guyot was speaking only the popular thought, 

 and other troubadours Pierre Cardinal, 2 for example of 



1 Wolfart, J. F.: Des Guiot von Provins bis jetzt bekannten Dichtim- 

 gen, etc. Halle, 1861. 

 'Lea H. C.: History of the Inquisition, N. Y., 1887, i., 55. 



