I do not propose to give a description of the life at the courts of Provence.  The news of it travelled north, and everywhere roused a desire to imitate it.  The need of a renewed life was powerfully stirring all hearts.  Men yearned for beauty and spontaneity, for passionate life, unprecedented and romantic.  This was especially the case in the north, in France and in Germany, and above all in Wales, the country of the imaginative and highly-gifted Celts.  Here life was harder, poorer, more barbaric; the cultured mind suffered more from its brutal surroundings than it did in the favoured south.  It was here that the great legends of the Middle Ages, so clearly expressive of the yearning of the period, were first collected.  The early Middle Ages had produced epic poems, treating scriptural subjects (such as the Harmony of the Gospels of the monk Otfrit, written in the ninth century), and celebrating the exploits of popular heroes, as, for instance, the German Song of Hildebrand, and the French “Chansons de Geste,” which contain episodes from the lives of Charlemagne and his nephew Roland.  The true epic, arising from the rich and poetical Celtic tradition, came into existence in the eleventh century in the North of France and immediately burst into extraordinary luxuriance.  The legends of the heroes of the dreamy Celtic race—­King Arthur and his knights, Merlin the magician, the knights of the Holy Grail—­travelling across France, became the common property of the civilised European nations, and filled all hearts with longing and fantastic dreams.  Chrestien de Troyes, in his romances, extolled knightly exploits and the service of woman, thus producing by the combination of the older and the newer ideals the novel of adventure which has fascinated the world for centuries.  It is a mistake to believe that Don Quixote has struck at the root of it; to this day the masses wax enthusiastic in reading of the doughty deeds of knights, the beauty of ladies and their unswerving, undying love.

In addition to the great and heroic subjects, there were lesser, more intimate, and frequently sentimental, romances, especially enjoyed and widely circulated by the ladies.  The baron, riding forth, left his young wife at home, shut up in her bower and surrounded by spies; sometimes even physically branded as his property.  A prisoner behind bars, her imagination went out—­not to the unloved husband who had married her for the sake of her broad acres, and could send her back to her parents as soon as he found a wealthier bride (he had but to maintain that she was related to him in the fifth degree and the Church was ready to annul the marriage), not to him, her lord and master, but to the unknown knight, the passionate lover, who would gladly give his life to win her.  A jongleur arrived with stories of the courts where love was the only ruler; where the knights willingly suffered grief and want, if by so doing they could serve their lady; where the lover, in the shape of