and queen with the whole court went into mourning; "for he was a much-loved cavalier," says the curate, " and was esteemed, like the Cid, both by friend and foe; and no Moor durst abide in that quarter of the field where his banner was displayed."

His body, after lying in state for several days in his palace. at Seville, with his trusty sword by his side, with which he had fought all his battles, was borne in solemn procession by night through the streets of the city, which was everywhere filled with the deepest lamentation; and was finally deposited in the great chapel of the Augustine church, in the tomb of his ancestors. Ten Moorish banners, which he had taken in battle with the infidel, before the war of Granada, were borne along at his funeral, "and still wave over his sepulchre," says Bernaldez, "keeping alive the memory of his exploits, as undying as his soul." The banners have long since mouldered into dust; the very tomb which contained his ashes has been. sacrilegiously demolished; but the fame of the hero will survive as long as anything like respect for valor, courtesy, unblemished honor, or any other attribute of chivalry, shall be found in Spain.

HARRIET WATERS PRESTON.

PRESTON, HARRIET WATERS, an American novelist and translator; born at Danvers, Mass., in 1843. She had made many translations from the French, especially from Sainte-Beuve and De Musset, and is particularly noted for her translation of Mistral's "Mirèio" (1873). Among her own works are "Aspendale " (1870).; "Love in the Nineteenth Century" (1874); "Troubadours and Trouvères " (1876); "Is That All?" (1878); "A Year in Eden" (1886); “A Question of Identity" (1887); "The Guardians" (1888). For several years until recently she resided abroad, and has furnished critical essays to American periodicals, notable among which is an article upon "Russian Novelists," in the "Atlantic Monthly."

THE TROUBADOURS.

A CURIOUS natural feature of Dalmatia - that long, narrow country straitened between the mountains and the Adriaticis the number of rivers which come up suddenly from underground, or burst full-grown from the bases of the hills, and seek the sea with a force and velocity of current all the more impressive from the mystery of their origin. Just so the poetry of the Troubadours leaps abruptly, in full volume, out of the mirk of the unlettered ages, and spreads itself abroad in a laughing flood of which the superficial sparkle may sometimes deceive concerning the strength of the undercurrent passion on which it is upborne.

Gai Saber the Gay Science was the name bestowed by these gushing singers themselves upon their newly discovered art of verse-making; and the epithet was perfectly descriptive. To the serious, disciplined, and systematic nineteenth-century mind, there is something incongruous, not to say indecent, in the association of science and joy. Whatever else the science may be, in whose sign we are supposed to conquer, it is not gay. But the Troubadour did not even know the difference between science and art. His era in the life of modern Europe

corresponds exactly with the insouciant season when "a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." The Troubadour was palpitating, moreover, with the two masterful enthusiasms of his time: the religious enthusiasm of the Crusades, and the high-flown sentiments and noble chimeras of the lately formulated code of chivalry.

Seizing the instrument nearest to his hand, a supple and still growing offshoot from the imperishable root of Latin speech, he shaped his pipe, fashioned his stops, and blew his amorous blast; and was so overcome by amazement at the delightful result, that he was fain loudly to proclaim himself the happy finder (trobaire) of the verbal music he had achieved, rather than its maker or poet.

Lenguc Romana, or Romans, was what he called his own language. To Dante, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, it was Provençal as distinguished from the lengua materna, or Italian; and Provençal it is, to this day, loosely called. But it was spoken in substantially the same form, far outside the fluctuating limits of medieval Provence; and one of the Troubadours themselves - Raimon Vidal-has in fact defined its limits very explicitly. "The only true language of poetry," he says, "is that of Limousin, Provence, Auvergne, and Quercy; . . . and every man born and brought up in those countries speaks the natural and right speech."

---

The time at which the troubadour minstrelsy flourished is as distinctly marked as its locality. Two hundred years, from the last decade of the eleventh century to the last of the thirteenth, comprise it all. Fifty years for its rise, a hundred for its most exuberant period, fifty more for its decline, and the brief but picturesque and exciting story is all told. The love of man for woman is its perpetual and almost exclusive theme; primarily that same "simple and sensuous" motif which was already old in the world when the all-knowing King of Israel sang, "Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away! For lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land!" The special form of the tender passion to which the troubadour tuned his lay was, however, the love of chivalry: theoretically a selfless and spiritual sentiment, having even a touch about it of religious exaltation. It involved the absolute devotion of life, wit, and prowess to the service of a formally chosen lady love; and was as much a part

of the sacramental obligations of a full-made knight as the service of God and of his feudal seigneur. The art in which this love found expression was thus essentially an aristocratic one; reserved for the practice of those who were either élite by birth and fortune, or ennobled by the possession of rare poetic gifts. Marriage was no part of its aim, and was never once, in the case of any well-known troubadour, its dénouement. The minstrel's lady was quite regularly the wife of another man; often of his feudal lord or sovereign ruler. The scope for tragedy and crime afforded by so fantastic a relation is obvious, and history has plenty to tell of the calamities which attended it in particular cases. Yet the austere ideal was never totally eclipsed; and that it survived the final disappearance of the troubadour as a court-minstrel and titular lover, we have abundant proof in the mystic lauds addressed by Dante to Beatrice and by Petrarch to Laura.

For the rest, the precocious perfection of form exhibited by some of the earliest troubadour songs which we possess, is not quite as miraculous as at first sight it appears. The main points in the mechanism of troubadour verse, both in its earlier and simpler, and in its later and highly elaborate developments, are two: strong tonic accents mostly iambic, though sometimes of trochaic lines and terminal rhymes. By these features it is radically distinguished from the quantitative measures of classic Greece and Rome: and in these respects it has furnished the model for almost all modern European poetry. But the rustic and popular poetry of the Latin race had been, from the first, a poetry of accent: and the tradition of it had been handed down through the early hymns of the Christian Church, and the rude staves and ballads trolled from town to town and from castle to castle during the Dark Ages, by the joculatores or jongleurs; those vagrant mimes and minstrels who played so large a part afterwards, in diffusing and popularizing the more refined compositions of the troubadours. Rhyme, on the other hand, though it might well have occurred to anybody as a fitting ornament of song, - rhyming words. and syllables being exactly as obvious and essential a form of harmony as musical chords, was very probably borrowed immediately from that Arabian verse in which it is so lavishly employed, during the long sojourn of the Saracens in Southern Europe.

It seems a curious freak of philological fate whereby a lit

erature so juvenile and impulsive as that of the troubadours, so destitute of connected thought, and at the same time so instinct with emotions, so that the very stress of feeling often renders its utterances vague, stammering, and all but unintelligible, should have become largely by virtue of its important historical position midway between the written word of ancient Rome and that of modern France-a favorite and hard-trodden field for dry research, grammatical quibbling, and controversy on technical points. But so it is. Every sigh of the troubadour minstrel has been analyzed, and every trill conjugated. Yet when all has been said and read, the reader's appreciation of this unique body of song will have to depend rather more upon personal divination and temperamental sympathy than upon any laboriously acquired skill in interpretation. Even for the name and lineage of many of the most famous and successful finders, as well as for the incidents of their lives, we are mainly dependent upon two sets of brief biographies, compiled by nameless monks, one in the twelfth and one in the fourteenth century. Of these cloistered authors, the earlier was no doubt contemporary with a certain number of his subjects; but we may safely conclude that they both adorned their facts, to some extent, with fancy and with fable. In selecting, out of a hundred or two of these romantic lives, a few as typical of all, we may think ourselves fortunate if, as in the case of the name that heads all the lists, the poet be a sufficiently exalted personage to have had a place in general history, and to have borne a part in the leading events of his time.

William IX., Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, was born in the year 1071, and succeeded in his fifteenth year to the sovereignty of a region comprising, besides Gascony and the southern half of Aquitaine, Limousin, Berry, and Auvergne. Almost alone among the great lords of southern France, he resisted the call of Raymond of Toulouse to the First Crusade in 1095; but when in the last year of the century the great news arrived of the capture of Jerusalem, and an appeal was made for the reinforcement of the small garrison left in the Holy Land, William was overborne, and prepared, though still reluctantly, to go. His amours had been numerous, and he had already written love songs, many of which are licentious to a degree, though some few reflect in sweet and simple strains the most refined ideals of chivalry.

Now, on the eve of his departure for the East, early in