The Provençal tongue is not a mixture (as is too often said) of Italian and French; nor is physical Provence a less fair Italy or a fairer France. A land wildly convulsed in its storms, mysteriously breathless in its calms; a garden here, a desert there; a land of translucent inlets and red porphyry hills; before all, a land of the illimitable grey of olive and limestone--this is Provence. Anyone finding himself of a sudden where the Provençal olives raise their dwarf heads with a weary look of eternity to the rainless heaven, would say that the dominant feature in the landscape was its exceeding seriousness. Sometimes on the coast the prevailing note changes from grey to blue; the blanched rocks catch the colour of the sea, and not the sky only, but dry fine air close around seems of a blueness so intense as to make the senses swim. Better suited to a Nature thus made up of crude discords and subtle harmonies is the old Provençal speech, howsoever corrupt, than the exquisite French of Parisian _salons_. But the language goes and the songs go too. Damase Arbaud relates how, when he went on a long journey to speak with a man reported to have cognisance of much traditional matter, he met, issuing from the house door, not the man, but his coffin. The fact is typical; the old order of things passes away: _nouastei diou se'n van_.
[Footnote 1: I am told that the peasants of the country round Moscow have a natural gift for imitating birds, and that they intersperse the singing of their own sad songs with this sweet carolling.]
In a paper published under the head of "Chaucer's Night Spell" in the Folk-lore Record (part i. p. 145), Mr Thoms drew attention to four lines spoken by the carpenter in Chaucer's _Miller's Tale_:
Lord Jhesu Crist, and seynte Benedyht Blesse this hous from every wikked wight, Fro nyghtes verray, the White Paternostre When wonestow now, seynte Petres soster.
("Verray" is commonly supposed to mean night-mare, but Mr Thoms referred it to "Werra," a Sclavonic deity.)
Mention of the White Paternoster occurs again in White's _Way to the True Church_ (1624):
White Paternoster, Saint Peter's brother, What hast i' th t'one hand? white booke leaves, What hast i' th t'other hand? heaven gate keyes. Open heaven gates, and streike (shut) hell gates: And let every crysome child creepe to its own mother. White Paternoster, Amen.