7 
nor a growth due to chance, but the creation of poets whose 
consummate art had inherited an ample stock of metric patterns 
and a wealth of ancient lore common to many European races. 
Our best folk-songs are not a direct legacy from the trouba- 
dours, for troubadour songs were written on parchment for the 
privilege of the nobility; they belonged to the aristocracy and 
H 
Mme. Jean-Baptiste Leblond, spinning and singing folk-songs, Sainte-Famille, 
Island of Orleans. 
the learned, not to the common people. They affected the 
finesse, the philosophy and literary mannerisms of the Latin 
decadence; and they were composed in the Limousin and Proven- 
cal dialects of oc, in southeastern France. The troubadours them- 
selves wrote their songs between the eleventh and the fourteenth 
centuries, whereas many of the best folk-songs belong to the two 
hundred years that followed. Our songs could not be transla- 
tions into oil of compositions originally in an oc dialect. The 
spirit, the technique, and the themes of the troubadour poems 
