The drinking-songs are equally spontaneous and fresh. Anacreon pales before the brilliancy of the Archipoeta when wine is in his veins, and the fountain of the Bacchic chant swells with gushes of strongly emphasised bold double rhymes, each throbbing like a man's firm stroke upon the strings of lyres. A fine audacity breathes through the praises of the wine-god, sometimes rising to lyric rapture, sometimes sinking to parody and innuendo, but always carrying the bard on rolling wheels along the paths of song. The reality of the inspiration is indubitable. These Bacchanalian choruses have been indited in the tavern, with a crowd of topers round the poet, with the rattle of the dice-box ringing in his ears, and with the facile maidens of his volatile amours draining the wine-cup at his elbow.

Wine is celebrated as the source of pleasure in social life, provocative of love, parent of poetry:[26]—

From his temple, the tavern, water-drinkers and fastidious persons are peremptorily warned:[27]—

The tavern is loved better than the church, and a bowl of wine than the sacramental chalice:[28]—

As in the love-songs, so in these drinking-songs we find no lack of mythological allusions. Nor are the grammatical quibbles, which might also have been indicated as a defect of the erotic poetry, conspicuous by absence. But both alike are impotent to break the spell of evident sincerity. We discount them as belonging to the euphuism of a certain epoch, and are rather surprised than otherwise that they should not be more apparent. The real and serious defect of Goliardic literature is not affectation, but something very different, which I shall try to indicate in the last Section of this treatise. Venus and Helen, Liber and Lyaeus, are but the current coin of poetic diction common to the whole student class. These Olympian deities merge without a note of discord into the dim background of a medieval pothouse or the sylvan shades of some ephemeral amour, leaving the realism of natural appetite in either case untouched.

It is by no means the thin and conventional sprinkling of classical erudition which makes these poems of the Goliardi pagan, and reminds the student of Renaissance art. Conversely, the scholastic plays on words which they contain do not stamp them out as medieval. Both of these qualities are rococo and superficial rather than essential and distinctive in their style. After making due allowances for either element of oddity, a true connoisseur will gratefully appreciate the spontaneous note of enjoyment, the disengagement from ties and duties imposed by temporal respectability, the frank animalism, which connects these vivid hymns to Bacchus and Venus with past Aristophanes and future Rabelais. They celebrate the eternal presence of mirth-making powers in hearts of men, apart from time and place and varying dogmas which do not concern deities of Nature.

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