We can hardly avoid the conclusion that by Golias Episcopus, Primas, and Archipoeta one and the same person, occupying a prominent post in the Order, was denoted.  He was the head of the Goliardic family, the Primate of the Wandering Students’ Order, the Archpoet of these lettered minstrels.  The rare excellence of the compositions ascribed to him caused them to be spread abroad, multiplied, and imitated in such fashion that it is now impossible to feel any certainty about the personality which underlay these titles.

Though we seem frequently upon the point of touching the real man, he constantly eludes our grasp.  Who he was, whether he was one or many, remains a mystery.  Whether the poems which bear one or other of his changing titles were really the work of a single writer, is also a matter for fruitless conjecture.  We may take it for granted that he was not Walter Map; for Map was not a Canon of Cologne, not a follower of Reinald von Dassel, not a mark for the severe scorn of Giraldus.  Similar reasoning renders it more than improbable that the Golias of Giraldus, the Primas of Salimbene, and the petitioner to Reinald should have been Walter of Lille.[48]

At the same time it is singular that the name of Walter should twice occur in Goliardic poems of a good period.  One of these is the famous and beautiful lament:—­

    “Versa est in luctum—­eithara Waltheri.”

This exists in the MS. of the Carmina Burana, but not in the Paris MS. of Walter’s poems edited by Mueldner.

It contains allusions to the poet’s ejection from his place in the Church—­a misfortune which actually befell Walter of Lille.  Grimm has printed another poem, Saepe de miseria, in which the name of Walter occurs.[49] It is introduced thus: 

    “Hoc Gualtherus sub-prior
      Jubet in decretis.”

Are we to infer from the designation Sub-prior that the Walter of this poem held a post in the Order inferior to that of the Primas?

It is of importance in this connection to bear in mind that five of the poems attributed in English MSS. to Golias and Walter Map, namely, Missus sum in vineam, Multiformis hominum, Fallax est et mobilis, A tauro torrida, Heliconis rivulo, Tanto viro locuturi, among which is the famous Apocalypse ascribed by Salimbene to Primas, are given to Walter of Lille in the Paris MS. edited by Mueldner.[50] They are distinguished by a marked unity of style; and what is also significant, a lyric in this Paris MS., Dum Gualterus aegrotaret, introduces the poet’s name in the same way as the Versa est in luctum of the Carmina Burana.  Therefore, without identifying Walter of Lille with the Primas, Archipoeta, and Golias, we must allow that his place in Goliardic literature is very considerable.  But I am inclined to think that the weight of evidence favours chiefly the ascription of serious and satiric