The transition from these trivial and slightly interesting comic songs to poems of a serious import, which played so important a part in Goliardic literature, must of necessity be abrupt. It forms no part of my present purpose to exhibit the Wandering Students in their capacity as satirists. That belongs more properly to a study of the earlier Reformation than to such an inquiry as I have undertaken in this treatise. Satires, especially medieval satires, are apt, besides, to lose their force and value in translation. I have therefore confined myself to five specimens, more or less closely connected with the subjects handled in this study.

The first has the interest of containing some ideas which Villon preserved in his ballad of the men of old time.