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whose eyes were red with weeping the loss of her favorite sparrow, crowned a life of the most flagitious excesses by poisoning her husband. Of the various ladies celebrated by Horace and Tibullus, it would really be difficult to discover which was most worthless, venal, and profligate. These were the refined loves of the classic poets.

*

The passion they celebrated never seems to have inspired one ennobling or generous sentiment, nor to have lifted them for one moment above the grossest selfishness. They had no scruple in exhibiting their mistresses to our eyes, as doubtless they appeared in their own, degraded by every vice, and in every sense contemptible; beings, not only beyond the pale of our sympathy, but of our toleration. Throughout their works, virtue appears a mere jest: Love stripped of his divinity, even by those who first deified him, is what we disdain to call by that name; sentiment, as we now understand the word, that is, the union of fervent love with reverence and delicacy towards its object,-a thing unknown and unheard of,—and all is "of the earth, earthy."

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It is for women I write; the fair, pure-hearted, delicate-minded, and unclassical reader will recollect that I do not presume to speak of these poets critically, being neither critic nor scholar; but merely with a reference to my subject, and with a reference to my sex. As monuments of the lan

guage and literature of a great and polished people, rich with a thousand beauties of thought and of style, doubtless they have their value and their merit; but as monuments also of a state of morals inconceivably gross and corrupt; of the condition of women degraded by their own vices, the vices and tyranny of the other sex, and the prevalence of the Epicurean philosophy, the tendency of which, (however disguised by rhetoric,) was ever to lower the tone of the mind; considered in this point of view, they might as well have all burned together in that vast bonfire of love-poetry which the Doctors of the Church raised at Constantinople-what a flame it must have made!*

"J'ai ouï dire dans mon enfance à Demetrius Chalcondyle, homme très instruit de tout ce qui regarde la Grèce, qui les Prétres avaient eu assez d'influence sur les Empereurs de Constantinople, pour les engager à brûler les ouvrages de pleusieurs anciens poëtes Grecs, et en particulier de ceux qui parlaient des amours, &c. *** Ces prêtres, sans doute, montrèrent une malveillance honteuse envers les anciens poëtes; mais ils donnerent une grande preuve d'integrité, de probité, et de religion."

ALCYONIUS.

This sentiment is put into the mouth of Leo X. at a time when the mania of classical learning was at its height.-See Roscoe, (Leo X.,) and Ginguené.

CHAPTER III.

THE LOVES OF THE TROUBADOURS.

Gente, che d'amor givan ragionando.-PETRARCA.

THE irruptions of the northern nations, among whom our sex was far better appreciated than among the polished Greeks and Romans; the rise of Christianity, and the institution of chivalry, by changing the moral condition of women, gave also a totally different character to the homage addressed to them. It was in the ages called gothic and barbarous, in that era of high feelings and fierce passions, of love, war, and wild adventure, that the sex began to take their true station in society. From the midst of ignorance, superstition, and ferocity, sprung up that enthusiasm, that exaggeration of sentiment, that serious, passionate, and imaginative adoration of women, which has since, indeed, degenerated into mere gallantry, but was the very fountain of all that is most elevated and elegant in modern poetry, and most graceful and refined in modern manners.

The amatory poetry of Provence had the same source with the national poetry of Spain; both were derived from the Arabians. To them we trace not only the use of rhyme, and the various forms of stanzas employed by the early lyric poets,

but by a strange revolution, it was from the East, where women are now held in seclusion, as mere soulless slaves of the passions and caprices of their masters, that the sentimental devotion paid to our sex in the chivalrous ages was derived.* The poetry of the Troubadours kept alive and enhanced the tone of feeling on which it was founded; it was cause and effect reacting on each other; and though their songs exist only in the collections of the antiquarian, and the very language in which they wrote has passed away, and may be accounted dead,- —so is not the spirit they left behind: as the founders of a new school of amatory poetry, we are under obligations to their memory, which throw a strong interest around their personal adventures, and the women they celebrated.

The tenderness of feeling and delicacy of expression in some of these old Provençal poets, are the more touching, when we recollect that the writers were sometimes kings and princes, and often knights and warriors, famed for their hardihood and exploits. William, Count of Poitou, our Richard the First, two Kings of Arragon, a King of Sicily, the Dauphin of Auvergne, the Count de Foix, and a Prince of Orange, were professors of the " gaye science." Thibault, Count of Prov

Sismondi-Littérature du Midi.

Thibault fat Roi galant et valoureux,

Ses hauts faits et son rangn'ont rien fait pour sa gloire; Mais il fut chansonnier et ses couplets heureux.

Nous ont conservé sa mémoire.-ANTH. DE MONET.

ence and King of Navarre, was another of these royal and chivalrous Troubadours, and his lais and his virelais were generally devoted to the praises of Blanche of Castile, the mother of Louis the Ninth-the same Blanche whom Shakspeare has introduced into King John, and decked out in panegyric far transcending all that her favored poet and lover could have offered at her feet.* Thibault did, however, surpass all his contemporaries in refinement of style: he usually concludes his chansons with an envoi, or address, to the Virgin, worded with such equivocal ingenuity, that it is equally applicable to the Queen of Heaven, or to the queen of his earthly thoughts," La Blanche couronnée." There is much simplicity and elegance in the following little song, in which the French has been modernized.

Las! si j'avais pouvoir d'oublier

Sa beauté,-son bien dire,

Et son très doux regarder

Finirait mon martyre!

Mais las! mon cœur je n'en puis ôter;
Et grand affolage
M'est d'espérer
Mais tel servage

Donne courage
A tout endurer.

*If lusty Love should go in quest of beauty,
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanche?
If zealous Love should go in search of virtue,
Where should he find it purer than in Blanche?
If Love, ambitious, sought a match of birth,
Whose veins bound richer blood than Lady Blanche

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