hands with the smooth and slender fingers”; in short, a picture which shows that troubadour ideas of beauty were much the same as those of any other age.  Arnaut was eventually obliged to leave Beziers, owing, it is said, to the rivalry of Alfonso II. of Aragon, who may have come forward as a suitor for Adelaide after Roger’s death in 1194.  The troubadour betook himself to the court of William VIII., Count of Montpelier, where he probably spent the rest of his life.  The various allusions in his poems cannot always [52] be identified, and his career is only known to us in vague outline.  Apart from the love-letter, he was, if not the initiator, one of the earliest writers of the type of didactic poem known as ensenhamen, an “instruction” containing observations upon the manners and customs of his age, with precepts for the observance of morality and right conduct such as should be practised by the ideal character.  Arnaut, after a lengthy and would-be learned introduction, explains that each of the three estates, the knights, the clergy and the citizens, have their special and appropriate virtues.  The emphasis with which he describes the good qualities of the citizen class, a compliment unusual in the aristocratic poetry of the troubadours, may be taken as confirmation of the statement concerning his own parentage which we find in his biography.

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CHAPTER V

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD

We now reach a group of three troubadours whom Dante[21] selected as typical of certain characteristics:  “Bertran de Born sung of arms, Arnaut Daniel of love, and Guiraut de Bornelh of uprightness, honour and virtue.”  The last named, who was a contemporary (1175-1220 circa) and compatriot of Arnaut de Marueil, is said in his biography to have enjoyed so great a reputation that he was known as the “Master of the Troubadours.”  This title is not awarded to him by any other troubadour; the jealousy constantly prevailing between the troubadours is enough to account for their silence on this point.  But his reputation is fairly attested by the number of his poems which have survived and by the numerous MSS. in which they are preserved; when troubadours were studied as classics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Guiraut’s poems were so far in harmony with the moralising tendency of that age that his posthumous reputation was certainly as great as any that he enjoyed in his life-time.

Practically nothing is known of his life; allusions in his poems lead us [54] to suppose that he spent some time in Spain at the courts of Navarre, Castile and Aragon.  The real interests of his work are literary and ethical.  To his share in the controversy concerning the trobar clus, the obscure and difficult style of composition, we have already alluded.  Though in the tenso with Linhaure, Guiraut expresses his preference for the simple and intelligible style,