POPULAR SONGS. 



which Montaigne contemptuously designated as being " void of honour and 

 of value." Some of these popular songs, for all their errors of grammar and 

 their incompleteness, are very remarkable works. The metre often seems 

 wrong, the rhyme is replaced by a mere assonance, and the meaning is badly 

 expressed ; but these trifling compositions have a charm all their own, and 

 present the true type of popular poetry. The professional poets, even the 

 greatest of them, did not think it beneath their dignity to borrow from this 

 popular poetry, which, in attempting to improve, they often spoilt. A charm- 

 ing couplet is that which Georges de Lalaing, a gentleman of the court of 

 Burgundy, who happened to remember having heard it somewhere in Brabant, 

 wrote in the album of Helene de Merode : 



" Elle s'en va aux champs, la petite bergiere, 

 Sa quenouille filant ; son troupeau suyt derriere. 

 Tant il la fait bon veoir, la petite bergiere, 

 Taut il la fait bon veoir." 



In the same album is preserved a village roundelay which was sung in the 

 Hainault : 



" Nous estions trois sceurs tout d'une volonte, 

 Nous alltmes au fond du joly bois jouer. . . . 

 A r ray Dieu ! Qu'il est heureux, qui se garde d'aimer ! " 



Most of these songs were set to popular airs which were familiar to 

 everybody, and the unknown origin of which in many cases went back for 

 centuries. Sometimes, however, the music had been composed at the same 

 time as the words, and also belonged to the music of the people, which has 

 always been remarkable for its exquisite grace and simplicity (Fig. 325). 



Every province and town one might almost add every village had its 

 particular songs, which were preserved in the memory of the inhabitants as 

 safely as if they were deposited in the local archives. These songs repre- 

 sented the ideas, the beliefs, the manners, and, above all, the idiom of the 

 district, and this idiom limited the preservation of them to the region in 

 which they were composed. Hence we have a mass of popular songs which 

 have become embedded in the various patois, and which date from every 

 period in history. The patois may be Flemish, Picard, Norman, Poitou, 

 Burgundian, Provencal, Auvergnat, or Lauguedoc, but in all alike one 

 hears the voice of the people. How ancient some of these songs are, not- 



