[Footnote 177: Of course this is only in comparison. For instance, in Dr Suchier's _Denkmäler_ (Halle, 1883), which contains nearly 500 large pages of Provençal _anecdota_, about four-fifths is devotional matter of various kinds and in various forms, prose and verse. But such matter, which is common to all mediæval languages, is hardly literature at all, being usually translated, with scarcely any expense of literary originality, from the Latin, or each other.]
[Footnote 178: Alberic's _Alexander_ (_v._ chap. iv.) is of course Provençal in a way, and there was probably a Provençal intermediary between the _Chanson d'Antioche_ and the Spanish _Gran Conquesta de Ultramar_. But we have only a few lines of the first and nothing of the second.]
That place is due to its lyric, construing that term in a wide sense such as that (but indeed a little wider) in which it has been already used with reference to the kindred and nearly contemporary lyric of France proper. It is best to say "nearly contemporary," because it would appear that Provençal actually had the start of French in this respect, though no great start: and it is best to say "kindred" and not "daughter," because though some forms and more names are common to the two, their developments are much more parallel than on the same lines, and they are much more sisters than mother and daughter.
It would appear, though such things can never be quite certain, that, as we should indeed expect, the first developments of Provençal lyric were of the hymn kind, and perhaps originally mixtures of Romance and Latin. This mixture of the vernacular and the learned tongues, both spoken in all probability with almost equal facility by the writer, is naturally not uncommon in the Middle Ages: and it helps to explain the rapid transference of the Latin hymn-rhythms to vernacular verse. Thus we have a _Noel_ or Christmas poem not only written to the tune and in the measure of a Latin hymn, _In hoc anni circulo_, not only crowning the Provençal six-syllable triplets with a Latin refrain, "De virgine Maria," and other variations on the Virgin's title and name, but with Latin verses alternate to the Provençal ones. This same arrangement occurs with a Provençal fourth rhyme, which seems to have been a favourite one. It is arranged with a variety which shows its earliness, for the fourth line is sometimes "in the air" rhyming to nothing, sometimes rhymes with the other three, and sometimes forces its sound on the last of them, so that the quatrain becomes a pair of couplets.