It is not, however, as an imitator of Dante that Santillana interests us. He himself was perhaps most proud of his attempt to naturalise the sonnet form in Spain; but these forty-two sonnets, fechos al itálico modo in Petrarch’s manner, are little more than curious, premature experiments. And, as I have already suggested, the passion of hate concentrated in the Doctrinal de privados is incommunicative at a distance of some four centuries and a half. Santillana attains real excellence in a very different vein. His natural lyrism finds almost magical expression in the serranillas of which La Vaquera de la Finojosa is the most celebrated example, and in the airy desires which show his relation to the Portuguese-Galician school. Indeed he has left us one song—

which Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo believes to be ‘one of the last composed in Galician by a Castilian trovador.’ In these popular or semi-pastoral lays, so apparently artless and so artfully ironical, Santillana has never been surpassed by any Spanish poet, though he is closely pressed by the anonymous writer of the striking serranilla morisca beginning—

and still more closely by the many-sided Lope de Vega in the famous barcarolle in El Vaquero de Moraña.

More learned, more professional and less spontaneous than Santillana, his friend Juan de Mena was in his place as secretary to Juan II. We know little of him except that he was born at Córdoba in 1411, that his youth was passed in poverty, that his studies began late, that he travelled in Italy, and that, after his introduction at court, he was a universal favourite till his death in 1456. Universal favourites are apt to be men of supple character, and it must have needed some dexterity to stand equally well with Álvaro de Luna and Santillana. Perhaps a Spaniard is entitled to be judged by the Spanish code, and Spaniards seem to regard Mena as a man of independent spirit. But it is unfortunate that our national standards in such matters differ so widely: for the question of Mena’s personal character bears on the ascription to him of certain verses which no courtier could have written.

With the disputable exception of Villena, Juan de Mena is the worst prose-writer in the Spanish language, and no one can doubt the justice of this verdict who glances at Mena’s commentary on his own poem La Coronación, or at his abridged version of the Iliad as he found it in the Ilias latina of Italicus. These lumbering performances are fatal to the theory that Mena wrote the Crónica de Don Juan II., a good specimen of clear and fluent prose. The ponderous humour of the verses which he meant to be light is equally fatal to the theory that he wrote the Coplas de la Panadera, a political pasquinade—not unlike The Rolliad—ascribed with much more probability by Argote de Molina to Íñigo Ortiz de Stúñiga. Till very recently, there was a bad habit of ascribing to Mena anonymous compositions written during his life—and even afterwards. But this is at an end, and we shall hear little more of Mena as the author of the Crónica de Juan II., of the Coplas de la Panadera, and of the Celestina. Henceforward attributions will be based on some reasonable ground.

Mena had an almost superstitious reverence for the classics, and describes the Iliad as ‘a holy and seraphic work.’ Unfortunately he is embarrassed by his learning, or rather by a deliberate pedantry which is even more offensive now than it was in his day. It takes a poet as great as Milton to carry off a burden of erudition, and Mena was no Milton. But he was a poet of high aims, and he produced a genuinely impressive allegorical poem in El Laberinto de Fortuna, more commonly known as Las Trezientas. The explanation of this popular title is simple. The poem in its original form consisted of nearly three hundred stanzas—297 to be precise—and another hand has added three more, no doubt to make the poem correspond exactly to its current title. Some of you may remember the story of Juan II.’s asking Mena to write sixty-five more stanzas so that there might be one for every day in the year; and the poet is said to have died leaving only twenty-four of these additional stanzas behind him. This is quite a respectable tradition as traditions go, for it is recorded by the celebrated commentator Hernán Núñez, who wrote within half a century of the poet’s death. We cannot, of course, know what Juan II. said, or did not say, to Mena; but the twenty-four stanzas are in existence, and the internal evidence goes to show that they were written after Mena’s time. They deal severely with the King—the ‘prepotente señor’ of whom Mena always speaks, as a court poet must speak, in terms of effusive compliment. Here, however, the question of character arises, and, as I have already noted, Spaniards and foreigners are at variance.

Thanks to M. Foulché-Delbosc, we are all of us at last able to read El Laberinto de Fortuna in a critical edition, and to study the history of the text reconstructed for us by the most indefatigable and exact scholar now working in the field of Spanish literature. It has been denied that El Laberinto de Fortuna owes anything to the Divina Commedia. The influence of Dante is plain in the adoption of the seven planetary circles, in the fording of the stream, in the vision of what was, and is, and is to be. The Laberinto contains reminiscences of the Roman de la Rose, and passages freely translated from Mena’s fellow-townsman Lucan. It is derivative, and, though comparatively short, it is often tedious. But are not most allegorical poems tedious? Macaulay has been reproached for saying that few readers are ‘in at the death of the Blatant Beast’: the fact being that Macaulay’s wonderful memory failed for once. The Blatant Beast was never killed. But how many educated men, how many professional literary critics, can truthfully say that they have read the whole of the Faerie Queene? How many of these few are prepared to have their knowledge tested? I notice that, now as always, a significant silence follows these innocent questions; and, merely pausing to observe that there are two cantos on Mutability to read after the Blatant Beast breaks ‘his yron chaine’ in the Sixth Book, I pass on.

The Laberinto, with its constant over-emphasis, is not to be compared with the Faerie Queene; but it has passages of stately beauty, it breathes a passionate pride in the glory of Castile, and, while the poet does all that metrical skill can do to lessen the monotonous throb of the versos de arte mayor, he also strives to endow Spain with a new poetic diction. Mena thought meanly of the vernacular—el rudo y desierto romance—as a vehicle of expression, and he was logically driven to innovate. He failed, partly because he latinised to excess; yet many of his novelties—diáfano and nítido, for example—are now part and parcel of the language, and many more deserved a better fate than death by ridicule. Like Herrera, who attempted a similar reform in the next century, Mena was too far in advance of his contemporaries; but this is not necessarily a sign of unintelligence. Mena was too closely wedded to his classical idols to develop into a great poet; still, at his happiest, he is a poet of real impressiveness, and his command of exalted rhetoric and resonant music enable him to represent—better even than Góngora, a far more splendid artist—the characteristic tradition of the poetical school of Córdoba.

I must find time to say a few words about Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara (also called, after his supposed birthplace in Galicia, Rodríguez del Padrón), whose few scattered poems are mostly love-songs, less scandalous than might be expected from such alarming titles as Los Mandamientos de Amor and Siete Gozos de Amor. Nothing in these amatory lyrics is so attractive as the legend which has formed round their author. He is supposed to have served in the household of Cardinal Juan de Cervantes about the year 1434, to have travelled in Italy and in the East, to have been page to Juan II., to have become entangled at court in some perilous amour, to have brought about a breach by his indiscreet revelations to a talkative friend, to have fled into solitude, and to have become a Franciscan monk. Some such story is adumbrated in Rodríguez de la Cámara’s novel El Siervo libre de Amor, and the romantic part of it—the love-episode—is confirmed by the official chronicler of the Franciscan Order. An anonymous writer of the sixteenth century goes on to state that Rodríguez de la Cámara went to France, became the lover of the French queen, and was killed near Calais in an attempt to escape to England. The imaginative nature of this postscript discredits the writer’s assertion that Rodríguez de la Cámara’s mistress at the Spanish court was Queen Juana, the second wife of Juan II.’s son, Enrique IV. Rightly or wrongly, Juana of Portugal is credited with many lovers, but Rodríguez de la Cámara was certainly not one of them. As El Siervo libre de Amor was written not later than 1439, the adventures recounted in it must have occurred—if they ever occurred at all—before this date; but the future Enrique IV. was first married in 1440 (to Blanca of Navarre), and his second marriage (to Juana of Portugal) did not take place till 1455. A simple comparison of dates is enough to ensure Juana’s acquittal. Few people like to see a scandalous story about historical personages destroyed in this cold-blooded way, and it has accordingly been suggested that the heroine was Juan II.’s second wife, the Isabel of Portugal who brought Álvaro de Luna to the scaffold. The substitution is capricious, but it has a plausible air. Chronology, again, comes to the rescue. Rodríguez de la Cámara became a monk before 1445, and Isabel of Portugal did not marry Juan II. till 1447. The identity of the lady is even harder to establish than that of the elusive Portuguese beauty celebrated during the next century by Bernardim de Ribeiro in Menina e Moça.

There are scores of Spanish books which you may read more profitably than Rodríguez de la Cámara’s novels. El Siervo libre de Amor and the Estoria de los dos amadores, Ardanlier é Liessa; and better verses than any he ever wrote may be found in the Cancionero of Juan Alfonso de Baena, who formed this corpus poeticum at some date previous to the death of Queen María, Juan II.’s first wife, in 1445. But Rodríguez de la Cámara has the distinction of being the first courtly poet to put his name to a romance. One of the three which he signs, and which were first brought to light by Professor Rennert, is a recast of a famous romance on Count Arnaldos. He was not the only court-poet of his time who condescended to write in the popular vein. Two romances, one of them bearing the date 1442, are given in the Cancionero de Stúñiga above the name of Carvajal who, as he resided at the court of Alfonso V. of Aragón in Naples, is outside the limits of our jurisdiction. But the best romances, the work of anonymous poets disdained by Santillana and more learned writers, will afford matter for another lecture.

CHAPTER IV

THE ROMANCERO

The Romancero has been described, in a phrase attributed to Lope de Vega, as ‘an Iliad without a Homer.’ More prosaically, it is a collection of romances; and, before going further, it may be as well to observe that the meaning of the word romance has become much restricted in course of time. Originally used to designate the varieties of speech derived from Latin, it was applied later only to the body of written literature in the different vernaculars of Romania, and then, by another limitation, it was applied solely to poems written in these languages. Lastly, the meaning of the word was still further narrowed in Spanish, and a romance has now come to mean a special form of verse-composition—an epical-lyric poem arranged primarily in lines of sixteen syllables with one assonance sustained throughout. There are occasional variants from the type. Some few romances have a refrain; in some of the oldest romances there is a change of assonance: but the normal form of the genuine popular romances is what I have just described it to be. There should be no mistake on this point, and yet a mistake may easily be made. Though the metrical structure of these popular Spanish ballads had been demonstrated as far back as 1815 by Grimm in his Silva de romances viejos, so good a scholar as Agustín Durán—to whom we owe the largest existing collection of romances—has printed them in such a shape as to give the impression 78 that they were written in octosyllabics of which only the even lines (2, 4, 6, 8, etc.) are assonanced. Moreover, he expounds this theory in his Discurso preliminar, and his view is supported by the high authority of Wolf.6 Still, it cannot be maintained. It is undoubtedly true that the later artistic ballads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, written by professional poets like Lope de Vega and Góngora, were composed in the form which Durán describes. We are not concerned this afternoon, however, with these brilliant artificial imitations, but with the authentic, primitive ballads of the people. These old Spanish romances, I repeat, are written normally in lines of sixteen syllables, every line ending in a uniform assonance. They should be printed so as to make this clear, and indeed they are so printed by the celebrated scholar Antonio de Nebrija who, in his Gramática sobre la lengua castellana (1492), quotes three lines from one of the Lancelot ballads:—

There are other erroneous theories respecting the romances against which you should be warned at the outset. Sancho Panza, in his pleasant way, informed the Duchess that these ballads were ‘too old to lie’; but he gives no particulars as to their age, and thereby shows his wisdom. Most English readers who are not specialists take their information on the subject from Lockhart’s Introduction to his Ancient Spanish Ballads, a volume containing free translations of fifty-three romances, published in 1823. Lockhart, who drew most of his material from Depping,7 probably knew as much about the matter as any one of his time in England; but, though we move slowly in our Spanish studies, we make some progress, and Lockhart’s opinions on certain points relating to the romances are no longer tenable. He notes, for example, that the Cancionero general contains ‘several pieces which bear the name of Don Juan Manuel,’ identifies this writer with the author of the Conde Lucanor, states that these pieces ‘are among the most modern in the collection,’ and naturally concludes that most of the remaining pieces must have been written long before 1348, the year of Don Juan Manuel’s death. Lockhart goes on to observe that the Moors undoubtedly exerted ‘great and remarkable influence over Spanish thought and feeling—and therefore over Spanish language and poetry’; and, though he does not say so in precise terms, he leaves the impression that this reputed Arabic influence is visible in the Spanish romances. These views, widely held in Lockhart’s day, are now abandoned by all competent scholars; but unfortunately they still prevail among the general public.

Milá y Fontanals, who incidentally informs us that Corneille was the first foreigner to quote a Spanish romance,8 states that these theories as to the antiquity and Arabic origin of the romances were first advanced by another foreigner—Pierre-Daniel Huet, Bishop of Avranches—towards the end of the seventeenth century.9 But they made little way till 1820, when the theory of Arabic origin was confidently reiterated by Conde in his Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España. Conde’s scholarship has been declared inadequate by later Orientalists, and the rest of us must be content to accept the verdict of these experts who alone have any right to an opinion on the matter. But it cannot be disputed that Conde had the knack of presenting a case plausibly, and of passing off a conjecture for a fact. Hence he made many converts who perhaps exaggerated his views. It is just possible—though unlikely—that there may be some slight relation between an Arabic zajal and such a Spanish composition as the serranilla quoted in the last lecture:—

But, in the first place, a serranilla is not a romance; and, in the second place, a more probable counter-theory derives the serranilla form from the Portuguese-Galician lyrics which are themselves of French origin. Beyond this very disputable relation, there is no basis for Conde’s theory. Dozy has shown conclusively that nothing could be more unlike than the elaborately learned conventions of Arabic verse and 81 the untutored methods of the Spanish romances, the artless expression of spontaneous popular poetry. It may be taken as established that there is no trace of Arabic influence in the romances, and there is no sound reason for thinking that any existing romance is of remote antiquity. So far from there being many extant specimens dating from before the time of Don Juan Manuel, there are none. What some have believed to be the oldest known romance—

refers to an incident which occurred in 1430, almost a century after Don Juan Manuel’s death; and even if we take for granted that one of the romances fronterizos or border-ballads—

was first written as early as 1368, we are still twenty years after Don Juan Manuel’s time. There may be romances which in their original form were written before these two; but, if so, they are unrecognisable. The authentic romances lived only in oral tradition; they were not thought worth writing down, and they were not printed till late in the day. The older a romance is, the more unlikely it is to reach us unchanged. No existing romance, in its present form, can be referred to any period earlier than the fifteenth century, and romances of this date are comparatively rare.

The first to mention this class of composition is Santillana in his well-known letter to the Constable of Portugal written shortly before 1450, and he dismisses the popular balladists with all the disdain of a gentleman who writes at his ease. ‘Contemptible poets are those who without any order, rule or rhythm make those songs and romances in which low folk, and of menial station, take delight.’ A cause must be prospering before it is denounced in this fashion, and it may therefore be assumed that many romances were current when Santillana delivered judgment. Writing in 1492 and quoting from the Lancelot ballad already mentioned, Nebrija speaks of it as ‘aquel romance antiguo’; but ‘old’ has a very relative meaning, and Nebrija may have thought that a ballad composed fifty years earlier deserved to be called ‘old.’ At any rate, the oldest romances no doubt took their final form between the time of Santillana’s youth and Nebrija’s, and the introduction of printing into Spain has saved some of these for us. But—it must be said again and again—they are comparatively few in number, and no Spanish ballad is anything like as ancient as our own Judas ballad which exists in a thirteenth-century manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Santillana slightly overstates his case when he speaks of those who composed romances as ‘contemptible poets’ catering for the rabble. We have seen that Rodrígue de la Cámara and Carvajal both wrote romances in the fourth or fifth decade of the fifteenth century. Santillana cannot have meant to speak contemptuously of his two contemporaries, one a poet at the Castilian court of Juan II., and the other a poet at the Neapolitan court of Alfonso V. of Aragón; he evidently knew nothing of these artistic romances, and would have been pained to hear that educated men countenanced such stuff. No doubt other educated men besides Rodríguez de la Cámara and Carvajal wrote in the popular manner; possibly the Lancelot ballad quoted by Nebrija is the work of some court-poet: the conditions were changing, and—though Santillana was perhaps unaware of it—the romances were rising in esteem. But Santillana is right as regards the earlier period. The primitive writers of popular romances were men of humble station, the impoverished representatives of those who had sung the cantares de gesta. These cantares de gesta were worked into the substance of histories and chronicles, and then went out of fashion. The juglares or singers came down in the world; in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they had been welcome at courts and castles where they chanted long epics; by the fourteenth century they sang corrupt abridgments of these epics to less distinguished audiences; by the fifteenth century the epical songs were broken up. The themes were kept alive by oral tradition in the shape of shorter lyrical narratives, and these transformed fragments of the old epics were the primitive romances condemned by Santillana.

The subjects of these popular ballads were historical or legendary characters like Roderick, Bernardo del Carpio, the Counts of Castile, Fernán González, the Infantes of Lara, the Cid and his lieutenant, and other local heroes. Later on, the nameless poets of the people were tempted to deal with the sinister stories which crystallised round the name of Peter the Cruel, the long struggle against the Moors, episodes famous in the Arthurian legends and the books of chivalry, exploits recorded in the chronicles of foreign countries, miscellaneous incidents borrowed from diverse sources. It was gradually recognised that the popular instinct had discovered a most effective vehicle of poetic expression; more educated versifiers followed the lead of Rodríguez de la Cámara and Carvajal, but with a certain shamefaced air. The collections of romances published by Alonso de Fuentes and Lorenzo de Sepúlveda (in 1550 and 1551 respectively) are mainly the work of lettered courtiers who, like the ‘Cæsarean Knight’—the Caballero Cesáreo who contributed to the second edition of Sepúlveda’s book—are conscious of their condescension, and withhold their names, under the quaint delusion that they are ‘reserved for greater things.’

But this bashfulness soon wore off. Before the end of the sixteenth century famous writers like Lope de Vega and Góngora proved themselves to be masters of the ballad-form, and within a comparatively short while there came into existence the mass of romances which fill the two volumes of the Romancero general published in 16OO and 1605. The best of these are brilliant performances; but they are late, artistic imitations. For genuine old popular romances we must look in broadsides, or in the collections issued at Antwerp and Saragossa in the middle of the sixteenth century by Martín Nucio and Esteban de Nájera respectively. We may also read them (with a good deal more) in the Primavera y Flor de romances edited by Wolf and Hofmann; and, most conveniently of all, in the amplified reprint of the Primavera for which we are indebted to Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo, the most eminent of living Spanish scholars. But the romances—not all of them very ancient—in the amplified Primavera fill three volumes; and, as it would be impossible to examine them one by one, it has occurred to me that the only practical plan is to take Lockhart as a basis, and to comment briefly on the ballads represented in his volume of translations—which I see some of you consulting. There may be occasion, also, to point out some omissions.

Lockhart begins with a translation of a romance quoted in Don Quixote by Ginés de Pasamonte, after the destruction of his puppet-show by the scandalised knight:—

85 The English rendering, though not very exact throughout, is adequate and spirited enough:—

In a prefatory note to his version, Lockhart says that this ballad ‘appears to be one of the oldest among the great number relating to the Moorish conquest of Spain.’ This is somewhat vague, but the remark might easily lead an ingenuous reader to think that the ballad was very ancient. This is not so. There is a thirteenth-century French epic, entitled Anséis de Carthage,13 which represents Charlemagne as establishing in Spain a vassal king named Anséis. Anséis dishonours Letise, daughter of Ysorés de Conimbre, and Ysorés takes vengeance by introducing the Arabs into Spain. Clearly this is another version of the legend concerning the dishonour of ‘La Cava,’ daughter of Count Julian (otherwise Illán or Urbán) by Roderick. Anséis is manifestly Roderick, Letise is ‘La Cava,’ Ysorés is Julian, and Carthage may be meant for Cartagena. The transmission of this story to France, and a passage in the chronicle of the Moor Rasis—which survives only in a Spanish translation made from a Portuguese version during the fourteenth century by a certain Maestro Muhammad (who dictated apparently to a churchman called Gil Pérez)—would point to the existence of ancient Spanish epics on Roderick’s overthrow. But no vestige of these epics survives.

The oldest extant romances relating to Roderick are derived from the Crónica Sarrazyna of Pedro del Corral, ‘a lewd and presumptuous fellow,’ who trumped up a parcel of lies, according to Pérez de Guzmán. Corral’s book is not all lies: he compiled it from the Crónica general, the chronicle of the Moor Rasis, and the Crónica Troyana, and padded it out with inventions of his own. But the point that interests us is that Corral made his compilation about the year 1443, and it follows that the romances derived from it must be of later date. They are much later: the oldest were not written till the sixteenth century, and therefore they are not really ancient nor popular. But some of them have a few memorable lines. For instance, in the first ballad translated by Lockhart:—

There is charm, also, in the romance which begins with the line:—

And as Lockhart omits this, I may quote the opening in Gibson’s excellent version15:—

The romances of this series have perhaps met with rather more success than they deserved on their intrinsic merits. The second ballad translated by Lockhart—

is quoted by Doña Rodríguez in Don Quixote; and the simple chance that these romances were lodged in Cervantes’s memory has made them familiar to everybody. Nor is this the end of their good fortune, for the first ballad translated by Lockhart caught the attention of Victor Hugo, who incorporated a fragment of it in La Bataille perdue.17 Among the twenty-five romances on Roderick in Durán’s collection, those by Timoneda, Lorenzo de Sepúlveda, and Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega can, of course, be no older than the middle or the latter half of the sixteenth century. Others, though anonymous, can be shown to belong, at the earliest, to the extreme end of the sixteenth century.

In a note to the eighth poem in his anthology—The Escape of Count Fernan Gonzalez—Lockhart mentions ‘La Cava,’ and remarks that ‘no child in Spain was ever christened by that ominous name after the downfall of the Gothic Kingdom.’ Sweeping statements of this kind are generally dangerous, but in this particular case one might safely go further, and say that no child in Spain, or anywhere else, was ever christened ‘La Cava’ at any time. ‘Cava’ appears to be an abbreviation or variant of the name ‘Alataba,’ and it is first given as the name of Count Julian’s daughter by the Moor Rasis, an Arab historian who lived two centuries after the downfall of the Gothic kingdom, and whose chronicle, as I have already said, survives only in a fourteenth-century Spanish translation made through the Portuguese. We cannot feel sure that the name ‘Cava’ occurred in the original Arabic; and, even if it did, no testimony given two hundred years after an event can be decisive. But why does Lockhart think that ‘Cava’ was an ominous name? Perhaps because he took it to be the Arabic word for a wanton. This is, in fact, the explanation given in the Historia verdadera del rey don Rodrigo y de la pérdida de España, which purports to be a translation from the Arabic of Abulcacim Tarif Abentarique. It is nothing of the kind. Abentarique is a mythical personage, and his supposititious chronicle was fabricated at Granada by a morisco called Miguel de Luna who, by the way, was the first to assert that ‘La Cava’s’ real name was Florinda. These circumstances enable us to assign a modern date to certain romances which are popularly supposed to be ancient. If a romance speaks of Roderick’s alleged victim as ‘La Cava’ in a derogatory sense, we know at once that it was written after the publication of Luna’s forgery in 1589: and accordingly we must reject as a late invention the notorious ballad beginning—

In Lockhart’s second group of romances the central figure is Bernardo del Carpio who, says the translator, ‘belongs exclusively to Spanish History, or rather perhaps to Spanish Romance.’ The word ‘perhaps’ may be omitted. Bernardo del Carpio was a fabulous paladin invented by the popular poets of Castile, who, either through the Chanson de Roland, or some similar poem, had heard of Charlemagne’s victories in the Peninsula. It is not absolutely certain that Charlemagne ever invaded Spain; still, his expedition is recorded by Arab historians as well as by Castilian chroniclers, and no doubt it was commonly believed to be an historical fact. But, as time went on, the idea that Charlemagne had carried all before him offended the patriotic sentiment of the Castilian folk-poets, and this led them to give the story a very different turn. What happened precisely is not clear, but the explanation suggested by Milá y Fontanals and Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo is ingenious and probable. Attracted perhaps by the French name of Bernardo, the juglares seem to have seized upon the far-off figure of a certain Bernardo (son of Ramón, Count of Ribagorza), who had headed successful raids against the Arabs. They removed the scene of his exploits from Aragón to Castile, transformed him into the son of the Count de Saldaña and Thiber, Charlemagne’s sister—or, alternatively, the son of the Count Don Sancho and Jimena, sister of Alfonso the Chaste—called him Bernardo del Carpio, and hailed him as the champion of Castile. The childless Alfonso is represented as inviting Charlemagne to succeed him when he dies; the mythical Bernardo protests in the name of Alfonso’s subjects, and the offer is withdrawn; thereupon Charlemagne invades Spain, and is defeated at Roncesvalles—not, as in the Chanson de Roland, by the Arabs, but—by Spaniards from the different provinces united under the leadership of Bernardo del Carpio. The Crónica general speaks of Bernardo’s slaying with his own hand ‘un alto ome de Francia que avie nombre Buesso,’ and this was developed later into a personal combat between Roland and Bernardo del Carpio who, of course, is the victor. These imaginary exploits were celebrated in cantares de gesta of which fragments are believed to be embedded in the Crónica general, and these are represented by three romances. None of the forty-six ballads in the Bernardo del Carpio series can be regarded as ancient with the possible exception of—

quoted in the Second Part of Don Quixote. This romance, as Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo thinks, is derived from a cantar de gesta written after the compilation of the Crónica general. Of the Bernardo romances printed in Duran’s collection four are by Lorenzo de Sepúlveda, four by Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega, and three by Lucas Rodríguez. Lockhart’s four examples are all modern, and his renderings are not specially successful; but in the original the first of the four—

is a capital imitation of a popular ballad. It makes its earliest appearance in the 1604 edition of the Romancero general, and that is enough to prove its modernity.

Another modern ballad, which is also first found in the Romancero general, is translated by Lockhart under the title of The Maiden Tribute. Neither the translation nor the original—

91calls for comment. A similar legend is associated with the name of Fernán González, the hero of the eighth poem in Lockhart’s book. Fernán González, Count of Castile, was an historical personage more remarkable as a political strategist than as a leader in the field. However, he makes a gallant figure in the Poema de Fernán González, a thirteenth-century poem written in the quaderna vía, which appears to have been imitated a hundred years later by the French author of Hernaut de Beaulande. But no extant romance on Fernán González is based on the Poema. The ballad translated by Lockhart—

comes from the Estoria del noble caballero Fernán González, a popular arrangement of the Crónica general as recast in 1344. The romance is a good enough piece of work, but it is more modern than the ballad beginning

and this last romance is less interesting than another ballad of the same period:—

Both of these are thought to represent a lost epic which was worked into the Crónica general of 1344.

Lockhart prints translations of two romances relating to the Infantes of Lara, one of them being modern,25 and the other the famous