[1] August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Ueber Dramatische Kunst, Heidelberg, 1811, 8vo, Vorlesung XIV.

[2] Augustin Thierry has in a few words finely described the fusion of society that originally took place in the northwestern part of Spain, and on which the civilization of the country still rests: “Reserrés dans ce coin de terre, devenu pour eux toute la patrie, Goths et Romains, vainqueurs et vaincus, étrangers et indigènes, maîtres et esclaves, tous unis dans le même malheur, oublièrent leurs vieilles haines, leur vieil éloignement, leurs vieilles distinctions; il n’y eut plus qu’un nom, qu’une loi, qu’un état, qu’un langage; tous furent égaux dans cet exil.” Dix Ans d’Études Historiques, Paris, 1836, 8vo, p. 346.

[3] Manuel Risco, La Castilla y el mas Famoso Castellano, Madrid, 1792, 4to, pp. 14-18.

[4] Speaking of this decisive battle, and following, as he always does, only Arabic authorities, Conde says, “This fearful rout happened on Monday, the fifteenth day of the month Safer, in the year 609 [A. D. 1212]; and with it fell the power of the Moslems in Spain, for nothing turned out well with them after it.” (Historia de la Dominacion de los Árabes en España, Madrid, 1820, 4to, Tom. II. p. 425.) Gayangos, in his more learned and yet more entirely Arabic “Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain,” (London, 1843, 4to, Vol. II. p. 323,) gives a similar account. The purely Spanish historians, of course, state the matter still more strongly;—Mariana, for instance, looking upon the result of the battle as quite superhuman. Historia General de España, 14a impresion, Madrid, 1780, fol., Lib. XI. c. 24.

[5] “And in that time,” we are told in the old “Crónica General de España,” (Zamora, 1541, fol., f. 275,) “was the war of the Moors very grievous; so that the kings, and counts, and nobles, and all the knights that took pride in arms, stabled their horses in the rooms where they slept with their wives; to the end that, when they heard the war-cry, they might find their horses and arms at hand, and mount instantly at its summons.” “A hard and rude training,” says Martinez de la Rosa, in his graceful romance of “Isabel de Solís,” recollecting, I suspect, this very passage,—“a hard and rude training, the prelude to so many glories and to the conquest of the world, when our forefathers, weighed down with harness, and their swords always in hand, slept at ease no single night for eight centuries.” Doña Isabel de Solís, Reyna de Granada, Novela Histórica, Madrid, 1839, 8vo, Parte II. c. 15.

[6] See Appendix (A.), on the History of the Spanish Language.

[7] The date of the only early manuscript of the Poem of the Cid is in these words: “Per Abbat le escribio en el mes de Mayo, en Era de Mill è CC..XLV años.” There is a blank made by an erasure between the second C and the X, which has given rise to the question, whether this erasure was made by the copyist because he had accidentally put in a letter too much, or whether it is a subsequent erasure that ought to be filled,—and, if filled, whether with the conjunction è or with another C; in short, the question is, whether this manuscript should be dated in 1245 or in 1345. (Sanchez, Poesías Anteriores, Madrid, 1779, 8vo, Tom. I. p. 221.) This year, 1245, of the Spanish era, according to which the calculation of time is commonly kept in the elder Spanish records, corresponds to our A. D. 1207;—a difference of 38 years, the reason for which may be found in a note to Southey’s “Chronicle of the Cid,” (London, 1808, 4to, p. 385,) without seeking it in more learned sources.

The date of the poem itself, however, is a very different question from the date of this particular manuscript of it; for the Per Abbat referred to is merely the copyist, whether his name was Peter Abbat or Peter the Abbot, (Risco, Castilla, etc., p. 68.) This question—the one, I mean, of the age of the poem itself—can be settled only from internal evidence of style and language. Two passages, vv. 3014 and 3735, have, indeed, been alleged (Risco, p. 69, Southey’s Chronicle, p. 282, note) to prove its date historically; but, after all, they only show that it was written subsequently to A. D. 1135. (V. A. Huber, Geschichte des Cid, Bremen, 1829, 12mo, p. xxix.) The point is one difficult to settle; and none can be consulted about it but natives or experts. Of these, Sanchez places it at about 1150, or half a century after the death of the Cid, (Poesías Anteriores, Tom. I. p. 223,) and Capmany (Eloquencia Española, Madrid, 1786, 8vo, Tom. I. p. 1) follows him. Marina, whose opinion is of great weight, (Memorias de la Academia de Historia, Tom. IV. 1805, Ensayo, p. 34,) places it thirty or forty years before Berceo, who wrote 1220-1240. The editors of the Spanish translation of Bouterwek, (Madrid, 1829, 8vo, Tom. I. p. 112,) who give a fac-simile of the manuscript, agree with Sanchez, and so does Huber (Gesch. des Cid, Vorwort, p. xxvii.). To these opinions may be added that of Ferdinand Wolf, of Vienna, (Jahrbücher der Literatur, Wien, 1831, Band LVI. p. 251,) who, like Huber, is one of the acutest scholars alive in whatever touches Spanish and Mediæval literature, and who places it about 1140-1160. Many other opinions might be cited, for the subject has been much discussed; but the judgments of the learned men already given, formed at different times in the course of half a century from the period of the first publication of the poem, and concurring so nearly, leave no reasonable doubt that it was composed as early as the year 1200.

Mr. Southey’s name, introduced by me in this note, is one that must always be mentioned with peculiar respect by scholars interested in Spanish literature. From the circumstance, that his uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill, a scholar, and a careful and industrious one, was connected with the English Factory at Lisbon, Mr. Southey visited Spain and Portugal in 1795-6, when he was about twenty-two years old, and, on his return home, published his Travels, in 1797;—a pleasant book, written in the clear, idiomatic, picturesque English that always distinguishes his style, and containing a considerable number of translations from the Spanish and the Portuguese, made with freedom and spirit rather than with great exactness. From this time he never lost sight of Spain and Portugal, or of Spanish and Portuguese literature; as is shown, not only by several of his larger original works, but by his translations, and by his articles in the London Quarterly Review on Lope de Vega and Camoens; especially by one in the second volume of that journal, which was translated into Portuguese, with notes, by Müller, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Lisbon, and so made into an excellent compact manual for Portuguese literary history.

[8] The Arabic accounts represent the Cid as having died of grief, at the defeat of the Christians near Valencia, which fell again into the hands of the Moslem in 1100. (Gayangos, Mohammedan Dynasties, Vol. II. Appendix, p. xliii.) It is necessary to read some one of the many Lives of the Cid in order to understand the Poema del Cid, and much else of Spanish literature; I will therefore notice four or five of the more suitable and important. 1. The oldest is the Latin “Historia Didaci Campidocti,” written before 1238, and published as an Appendix in Risco. 2. The next is the cumbrous and credulous one by Father Risco, 1792. 3. Then we have a curious one by John von Müller, the historian of Switzerland, 1805, prefixed to his friend Herder’s Ballads of the Cid. 4. The classical Life by Manuel Josef Quintana, in the first volume of his “Vidas de Españoles Célebres” (Madrid, 1807, 12mo). 5. That of Huber, 1829; acute and safe. The best of all, however, is the old Spanish “Chronicle of the Cid,” or Southey’s Chronicle, 1808;—the best, I mean, for those who read in order to enjoy what may be called the literature of the Cid;—to which may be added a pleasant little volume by George Dennis, entitled “The Cid, a Short Chronicle founded on the Early Poetry of Spain,” London, 1845, 12mo.

[9] Chrónica del Cid, Burgos, 1593, fol., c. 19.

[10] Huber, p. 96. Müller’s Leben des Cid, in Herder’s Sämmtliche Werke, zur schönen Literatur und Kunst, Wien, 1813, 12mo, Theil III. p. xxi.

[11] “No period of Spanish history is so deficient in contemporary documents.” Huber, Vorwort, p. xiii.

[12] It is amusing to compare the Moorish accounts of the Cid with the Christian. In the work of Conde on the Arabs of Spain, which is little more than a translation from Arabic chronicles, the Cid appears first, I think, in the year 1087, when he is called “the Cambitur [Campeador] who infested the frontiers of Valencia.” (Tom. II. p. 155.) When he had taken Valencia, in 1094, we are told, “Then the Cambitur—may he be accursed of Allah!—entered in with all his people and allies.” (Tom. II. p. 183.) In other places he is called “Roderic the Cambitur,”—“Roderic, Chief of the Christians, known as the Cambitur,”—and “the Accursed”;—all proving how thoroughly he was hated and feared by his enemies. He is nowhere, I think, called Cid or Seid by Arab writers; and the reason why he appears in Conde’s work so little is, probably, that the manuscripts used by that writer relate chiefly to the history of events in Andalusia and Granada, where the Cid did not figure at all. The tone in Gayangos’s more learned and accurate work on the Mohammedan Dynasties is the same. When the Cid dies, the Arab chronicler (Vol. II. App., p. xliii.) adds, “May God not show him mercy!”

[13] This is the opinion of John von Müller and of Southey, the latter of whom says, in the Preface to his Chronicle, (p. xi.,) “The poem is to be considered as metrical history, not as metrical romance.” But Huber, in the excellent Vorwort to his Geschichte, (p. xxvi.,) shows this to be a mistake; and in the introduction to his edition of the Chronicle, (Marburg, 1844, 8vo, p. xlii.,) shows further, that the poem was certainly not taken from the old Latin Life, which is the proper foundation for what is historical in our account of the Cid.

[14] Mariana is much troubled about the history of the Cid, and decides nothing (Historia, Lib. X. c. 4);—Sandoval controverts much, and entirely denies the story of the Counts of Carrion (Reyes de Castilla, Pamplona, 1615, fol., f. 54);—and Ferreras (Synopsis Histórica, Madrid, 1775, 4to, Tom. V. pp. 196-198) endeavours to settle what is true and what is fabulous, and agrees with Sandoval about the marriage of the daughters of the Cid with the Counts. Southey (Chronicle, pp. 310-312) argues both sides, and shows his desire to believe the story, but does not absolutely succeed in doing so.

[15] The poem was originally published by Sanchez, in the first volume of his valuable “Poesías Castellanas Anteriores al Siglo XV.” (Madrid, 1779-90, 4 tom., 8vo; reprinted by Ochoa, Paris, 1842, 8vo.) It contains three thousand seven hundred and forty-four lines, and, if the deficiencies in the manuscript were supplied, Sanchez thinks the whole would come up to about four thousand lines. But he saw a copy made in 1596, which, though not entirely faithful, showed that the older manuscript had the same deficiencies then that it has now. Of course, there is little chance that they will ever be supplied.

[16] I would instance the following lines on the famine in Valencia during its Siege by the Cid:—

From the use of Señores, “Sirs,” in this passage, as well as from other lines, like v. 734 and v. 2291, I have thought the poem was either originally addressed to some particular persons, or was intended—which is most in accordance with the spirit of the age—to be recited publicly.

[17] For example:—

Some of the irregularities of the versification may be owing to the copyist, as we have but one manuscript to depend upon; but they are too grave and too abundant to be charged, on the whole, to any account but that of the original author.

[18] Some of the lines of this passage in the original (vv. 723, etc.) may be cited, to show that gravity and dignity were among the prominent attribute of the Spanish language from its first appearance.

[19] This and the two following translations were made by Mr. J. Hookham Frere, one of the most accomplished scholars England has produced, and one whom Sir James Mackintosh has pronounced to be the first of English translators. He was, for some years, British Minister in Spain, and, by a conjectural emendation which he made of a line in this very poem, known only to himself and the Marquis de la Romana, was able to accredit a secret agent to the latter in 1808, when he was commanding a body of Spanish troops in the French service on the soil of Denmark;—a circumstance that led to one of the most important movements in the war against Bonaparte. (Southey’s History of the Peninsular War, London, 1823, 4to, Tom. I. p. 657.) The admirable translations of Mr. Frere from the Poem of the Cid, are to be found in the Appendix to Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid; itself an entertaining book, made out of free versions and compositions from the Spanish Poem of the Cid, the old ballads, the prose Chronicle of the Cid, and the General Chronicle of Spain. Mr. Wm. Godwin, in a somewhat singular “Letter of Advice to a Young American on a Course of Studies,” (London, 1818, 8vo,) commends it justly as one of the books best calculated to give an idea of the age of chivalry.

It is proper I should add here, that, except in this case of the Poem of the Cid, where I am indebted to Mr. Frere for the passages in the text, and in the case of the Coplas of Manrique, (Chap. 21 of this Period,) where I am indebted to the beautiful version of Mr. Longfellow, the translations in these volumes are made by myself.

[20] This division, and some others less distinctly marked, have led Tapia (Historia de la Civilización de España, Madrid, 1840, 12mo, Tom. I. p. 268) to think, that the whole poem is but a congeries of ballads, as the Iliad has sometimes been thought to be, and, as there is little doubt, the Nibelungenlied really is. But such breaks occur so frequently in different parts of it, and seem so generally to be made for other reasons, that this conjecture is not probable. (Huber, Chrónica del Cid, p. xl.) Besides, the whole poem more resembles the Chansons de Geste of old French poetry, and is more artificial in its structure, than the nature of the ballad permits.

[21]

This passage, with what precedes and what follows it, may be compared with the challenge in Shakspeare’s “Richard II.,” Act IV.

[22]

A parallel passage from Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale”—the combat between Palamon and Arcite (Tyrwhitt’s edit., v. 2601)—should not be overlooked.

And so on twenty lines farther, both in the English and the Spanish. But it should be borne in mind, when comparing them, that the Poem of the Cid was written two centuries earlier than the “Canterbury Tales” were.

[23] The change of opinion in relation to the Poema del Cid, and the different estimates of its value, are remarkable circumstances in its history. Bouterwek speaks of it very slightingly,—probably from following Sarmiento, who had not read it,—and the Spanish translators of Bouterwek almost agree with him. F. v. Schlegel, however, Sismondi, Huber, Wolf, and nearly or quite all who have spoken of it of late, express a strong admiration of its merits. There is, I think, truth in the remark of Southey (Quarterly Review, 1814, Vol. XII. p. 64): “The Spaniards have not yet discovered the high value of their metrical history of the Cid, as a poem; they will never produce any thing great in the higher branches of art, till they have cast off the false taste which prevents them from perceiving it.”

Of all poems belonging to the early ages of any modern nation, the one that can best be compared with the Poem of the Cid is the Nibelungenlied, which, according to the most judicious among the German critics, dates, in its present form at least, about half a century after the time assigned to the Poem of the Cid. A parallel might easily be run between them, that would be curious.

In the Jahrbücher der Literatur, Wien, 1846, Band CXVI., M. Francisque Michel, the scholar to whom the literature of the Middle Ages owes so much, published, for the first time, what remains of an old poetical Spanish chronicle,—“Chrónica Rimada de las Cosas de España,”—on the history of Spain from the death of Pelayo to Ferdinand the Great;—the same poem that is noticed in Ochoa, “Catálogo de Manuscritos,” (Paris, 1844, 4to, pp. 106-110,) and in Huber’s edition of the Chronicle of the Cid, Preface, App. E.

It is a curious, though not important, contribution to our resources in early Spanish literature, and one that immediately reminds us of the old Poem of the Cid. It begins with a prose introduction on the state of affairs down to the time of Fernan Gonzalez, compressed into a single page, and then goes on through eleven hundred and twenty-six lines of verse, when it breaks off abruptly in the middle of a line, as if the copyist had been interrupted, but with no sign that the work was drawing to an end. Nearly the whole of it is taken up with the history of the Cid, his family and his adventures, which are sometimes different from those in the old ballads and chronicles. Thus, Ximena is represented as having three brothers, who are taken prisoners by the Moors and released by the Cid; and the Cid is made to marry Ximena, by the royal command, against his own will; after which he goes to Paris, in the days of the Twelve Peers, and performs feats like those in the romances of chivalry. This, of course, is all new. But the old stories are altered and amplified, like those of the Cid’s charity to the leper, which is given with a more picturesque air, and of Ximena and the king, and of the Cid and his father, which are partly thrown into dialogue, not without dramatic effect. The whole is a free version of the old traditions of the country, apparently made in the fifteenth century, after the fictions of chivalry began to be known, and with the intention of giving the Cid rank among their heroes.

The measure is that of the long verses used in the older Spanish poetry, with a cæsural pause near the middle of each, and the termination of the lines is in the asonante a-o.[*] But in all this there is great irregularity;—many of the verses running out to twenty or more syllables, and several passages failing to observe the proper asonante. Every thing indicates that the old ballads were familiar to the author, and from one passage I infer that he knew the old poem of the Cid:—

The preceding lines seem imitated from the Cid’s fight before Alcocer, in such a way as to leave no doubt that its author had seen the old poem:—

[*] For the meaning of asonante, and an explanation of asonante verse, see Chap. VI. and the notes to it.

[24] The only knowledge of the manuscript containing these three poems was long derived from a few extracts in the “Biblioteca Española” of Rodriguez de Castro;—an important work, whose author was born in Galicia, in 1739, and died at Madrid, in 1799. The first volume, printed in 1781, in folio, under the patronage of the Count Florida Blanca, consists of a chronological account of the Rabbinical writers who appeared in Spain from the earliest times to his own, whether they wrote in Hebrew, Spanish, or any other language. The second, printed in 1786, consists of a similar account of the Spanish writers, heathen and Christian, who wrote either in Latin or in Spanish down to the end of the thirteenth century, and whose number he makes about two hundred. Both volumes are somewhat inartifically compiled, and the literary opinions they express are of small value; but their materials, largely derived from manuscripts, are curious, and frequently such as can be found in print nowhere else.

In this work, (Madrid, 1786, fol., Vol. II. pp. 504, 505,) and for a long time, as I have said, there alone, were found notices of these poems; but all of them were printed at the end of the Paris edition of Sanchez’s “Coleccion de Poesías Anteriores al Siglo XV.,” from a copy of the original manuscript in the Escurial, marked there III. K. 4to. Judging by the specimens given in De Castro, the spelling of the manuscript has not been carefully followed in the copy used for the Paris edition.

[25] The story of Apollonius, Prince of Tyre, as it is commonly called, and as we have its incidents in this long poem, is the 153d tale of the “Gesta Romanorum” (s. l., 1488, fol.). It is, however, much older than that collection. (Douce, Illustrations of Shakspeare, London, 1807, 8vo, Vol. II. p. 135; and Swan’s translation of the Gesta, London, 1824, 12mo, Vol. II. pp. 164-495.) Two words in the original Spanish of the passage translated in the text should be explained. The author says,—

Romance here evidently means story, and this is the earliest use of the word in this sense that I know of. Maestría, like our old English Maisterie, means art or skill, as in Chaucer, being the word afterwards corrupted into Mystery.

[26] St. Mary of Egypt was a saint of great repute in Spain and Portugal, and had her adventures written by Pedro de Ribadeneyra in 1609, and Diogo Vas Carrillo in 1673; they were also fully given in the “Flos Sanctorum” of the former, and, in a more attractive form, by Bartolomé Cayrasco de Figueroa, at the end of his “Templo Militante,” (Valladolid, 1602, 12mo,) where they fill about 130 flowing octave stanzas, and by Montalvan, in the drama of “La Gitana de Menfis.” She has, too, a church dedicated to her at Rome on the bank of the Tiber, made out of the graceful ruins of the temple of Fortuna Virilis. But her coarse history has often been rejected as apocryphal, or at least as unfit to be repeated. Bayle, Dictionaire Historique et Critique, Amsterdam, 1740, fol., Tom. III. pp. 334-336.

[27] Both of the last poems in this MS. were first printed by Pidal in the Revista de Madrid, 1841, and, as it would seem, from bad copies. At least, they contain many more inaccuracies of spelling, versification, and style than the first, and appear to be of a later age; for I do not think the French Fabliaux, which they imitate, were known in Spain till after the period commonly assigned to the Apollonius.

[28] It is in Sta. Oria, st. 2.

[29] Sanchez, Poesías Anteriores, Tom. II. p. iv.; Tom. III. pp. xliv.-lvi. As Berceo was ordained Deacon in 1221, he must have been born as early as 1198, since deacon’s orders were not taken before the age of twenty-three. See some curious remarks on the subject of Berceo in the “Examen Crítico del Tomo Primero de el Anti-Quixote,” (Madrid, 1806, 12mo, pp. 22 et seq.,) an anonymous pamphlet, written, I believe, by Pellicer, the editor of Don Quixote.

[30] The second volume of Sanchez’s Poesías Anteriores.

[31] The metrical form adopted by Berceo, which he himself calls the quaderna via, and which is in fact that of the poem of Apollonius, should be particularly noticed, because it continued to be a favorite one in Spain for above two centuries. The following stanzas, which are among the best in Berceo, may serve as a favorable specimen of its character. They are from the “Signs of the Judgment,” Sanchez, Tom. II. p. 274.

There was, no doubt, difficulty in such a protracted system of rhyme, but not much; and when rhyme first appeared in the modern languages, an excess of it was the natural consequence of its novelty. In large portions of the Provençal poetry, its abundance is quite ridiculous; as in the “Croisade contre les Hérétiques Albigeois,”—a remarkable poem, dating from 1210, excellently edited by M. C. Fauriel, (Paris, 1837, 4to,)—in which stanzas occur where the same rhyme is repeated above a hundred times. When and where this quaternion rhyme, as it is used by Berceo, was first introduced, cannot be determined; but it seems to have been very early employed in poems that were to be publicly recited. (F. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, Wien. 1841, 8vo, p. 257.) The oldest example I know of it, in a modern dialect, dates from about 1100, and is found in the curious MS. of Poetry of the Waldenses (F. Diez, Troubadours, Zwickau, 1826, 8vo, p. 230) used by Raynouard;—the instance to which I refer being “Lo novel Confort,” (Poésies des Troubadours, Paris, 1817, 8vo, Tom. II. p. 111,) which begins,—

In Spain, whither it no doubt came from Provence, its history is simply,—that it occurs in the poem of Apollonius; that it gets its first known date in Berceo about 1230; and that it continued in use till the end of the fourteenth century.

The thirteen thousand verses of Berceo’s poetry, including even the Hymns, are, with the exception of about twenty lines of the “Duelo de la Vírgen,” in this measure. These twenty lines constitute a song of the Jews who watched the sepulchre after the crucifixion, and, like the parts of the demons in the old Mysteries, are intended to be droll, but are, in fact, as Berceo himself says of them, more truly than perhaps he was aware, “not worth three figs.” They are, however, of some consequence, as perhaps the earliest specimen of Spanish lyrical poetry that has come down to us with a date. They begin thus:—

Sanchez considers it a Villancico, to be sung like a litany (Tom. IV. p. ix.); and Martinez de la Rosa treats it much in the same way. Obras, Paris, 1827, 12mo, Tom. I. p. 161.

In general, the versification of Berceo is regular,—sometimes it is harmonious; and though he now and then indulges himself in imperfect rhymes, that may be the beginning of the national asonantes (Sanchez, Tom. II. p. xv.) still the license he takes is much less than might be anticipated. Indeed, Sanchez represents the harmony and finish of his versification as quite surprising, and uses stronger language in relation to it than seems justifiable, considering some of the facts he admits. Tom. II. p. xi.

[32] San Domingo de Silos, st. 1 and 2. The Saviour, according to the fashion of the age, is called, in v. 2, Don Jesu Christo,—the word then being synonymous with Dominus. See a curious note on its use, in Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Madrid, 1836, 4to, Tom. V. p. 408.

[33]

[34] A good account of this part of Berceo’s works, though, I think, somewhat too severe, is to be found in Dr. Dunham’s “History of Spain and Portugal,” (London, 1832, 18mo, Tom. IV. pp. 215-229,) a work of merit, the early part of which, as in the case of Berceo, rests more frequently than might be expected on original authorities. Excellent translations will be found in Prof. Longfellow’s Introductory Essay to his version of the Coplas de Manrique, Boston, 1833, 12mo, pp. 5 and 10.

[35] For example, when the Madonna is represented looking at the cross, and addressing her expiring son:—

I read these stanzas with a feeling akin to that with which I should look at a picture on the same subject by Perugino. They may be translated thus:—

[36] Mariana, Hist., Lib. XII. c. 15, ad fin.

[37] Diez, Poesie der Troubadours, pp. 75, 226, 227, 331-350. A long poem on the influence of the stars was addressed to Alfonso by Nat de Mons (Raynouard, Troub., Tom. V. p. 269); and besides the curious poem addressed to him by Giraud Riquier of Narbonne, in 1275, given by Diez, we know that in another poem this distinguished Troubadour mourned the king’s death. Raynouard, Tom. V. p. 171. Millot, Histoire des Troubadours, Paris, 1774, 12mo, Tom. III. pp. 329-374.

[38] Historia, Lib. XIII. c. 20. The less favorable side of Alfonso’s character is given by the cynical Bayle, Art., Castile.

[39] This letter, which the Spanish Academy calls “inimitable,” though early known in MS., seems to have been first printed by Ortiz de Zuñiga (Anales de Sevilla, Sevilla, 1677, fol., p. 124). Several old ballads have been made out of it, one of which is to be found in the “Cancionero de Romances,” por Lorenço de Sepúlveda (Sevilla, 1584, 18mo, f. 104). The letter is found in the preface to the Academy’s edition of the Partidas, and is explained by the accounts in Mariana, (Hist., Lib. XIV. c. 5,) Conde, (Dominacion de los Árabes, Tom. III. p. 69,) and Mondejar (Memorias, Lib. VI. c. 14). The original is said to be in the possession of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia. Semanario Pintoresco, 1845, p. 303.

[40] A race of African princes, who reigned in Morocco, and subjected all Western Africa. Crónica de Alfonso XI., Valladolid, 1551, fol., c. 219. Gayangos, Mohammedan Dynasties, Vol. II. p. 325.

[41] Alonzo Perez de Guzman, of the great family of that name, the person to whom this remarkable letter is addressed, went over to Africa in 1276, with many knights, to serve Aben Jusaf against his rebellious subjects, stipulating that he should not be required to serve against Christians. Ortiz de Zuñiga, Anales, p. 113.

[42] The principal life of Alfonso X. is that by the Marquis of Mondejar (Madrid, 1777, fol.); but it did not receive its author’s final revision, and is an imperfect work. (Prólogo de Cerdá y Rico; and Baena, Hijos de Madrid, Madrid, 1790, 4to, Tom. II. pp. 304-312.) For the part of Alfonso’s life devoted to letters, ample materials are to be found in Castro, (Biblioteca Española, Tom. II. pp. 625-688,) and in the Repertorio Americano (Lóndres, 1827, Tom. III. pp. 67-77); where there is a valuable paper, written, I believe, by Salvá, who published that journal.