If we then turn to the earlier part, that which comes before the Carrion story, we shall find the irregularity greater still. It is possible, no doubt, by making rules sufficiently elastic, to devise some sort of a system for five consecutive lines which end folgar, comer, acordar, grandes, and pan; but it will be a system so exceedingly elastic that it seems a superfluity of trouble to make it. On a general survey it may, I think, be said that either in double or single assonance a and o play a much larger part than the other vowels, whereas in the French analogues there is no predominance of this kind, or at least nothing like so much. And lastly, to conclude these rather desultory remarks on a subject which deserves much more attention than it has yet had, it may be worth observing that by an odd coincidence the Poema del Cid concludes with a delusive personal mention very similar to, though even more precise than, that about "Turoldus" in the Chanson de Roland. For it ends "Per Abbat le escribio en el mes de maio there being, perhaps, something dropped between the second c and the X. Peter Abbat, however, has been less fortunate than Turoldus, in that no one, it seems, has asserted his authorship, though he may have been the copyist-malefactor of theory. And it may perhaps 1 I have not thought it necessary to give an abstract of the contents of the poem, because Southey's Chronicle of the Cid is accessible to everybody, and because no wise man will ever attempt to do over again what Southey has once done. be added that if MCCXLV. is the correct date, this would correspond to 1207 of our chronology, the Spanish mediæval era starting thirty-eight years too early. Other poems. The remaining literature before the end of the thirteenth century (immediately after that date there is a good deal, but most of it is imitated from France) may be dismissed more briefly. It is not very bulky, but it is noteworthy that it is collected in a manner by no means usual at the time, under two known names, those of Gonzalo Berceo, priest of St Elianus at Callahorra, and of King Alfonso X. For the Spanish Alexander of Juan Lorenzo Segura, though written before 1300, is clearly but one of the numerous family of the French and FrenchLatin Alexandreids and Romans d'Alixandre. And certain poems on Apollonius of Tyre, St Mary of Egypt, and the Three Kings, while their date is rather uncertain, are also evidently "school poems" of the same kind. The Spanish Apollonius, however, is noteworthy, because it is written in a form which is also used by Apollonius and Berceo, and which has sometimes been Mary of Egypt. thought to be spoken of in the poem itself as nueva maestria. This measure is the old fourteener, which struggles to appear in the Cid, regularly divided into hephthemimers, and now regularly arranged also in mono-rhymed quatrains. The “Life of St Mary of Egypt," 2 on the other hand, is in octosyllabic couplets, treated with the same freedom. that we find in contemporary German handlings of 1 Sanchez-Ochoa, op. cit., pp. 525-561. 2 Ibid., pp. 561-576. that metre, and varying from five syllables to at least eleven. The rhymes are good, with very rare lapses into assonance; one might suspect a pretty close adherence to a probably Provençal original, and perhaps not a very early date. Ticknor, whose Protestantism or whose prudery seems to have been shocked by this "coarse and indecent history "-he might surely have found politer language for a variant of the Magdalene story, which is beautiful in itself and has received especial ornament from art—thought it composed of "meagre monkish verse," and "hardly of importance" except as a monument of language. I should myself venture-with infinitely less competence in the particular language, but some knowledge of other things of the same kind and time-to call it a rather lively and accomplished performance of its class. The third piece1 of those published, not by Sanchez himself, but as an appendix to the Paris edition, is the Adoracion de Los Santos Reyes, a poem shorter than the Santa Maria Egipciaca, but very similar in manner as well as in subject. I observe that Ticknor, in a note, seems himself to be of the opinion that these two pieces are not so old as the Apollonius; though his remarks about "the French fabliaux" are not to the point. The fabliaux, it is true, are in octosyllabic verse; but octosyllabic verse is certainly older than the fabliaux, which have nothing to do with the Lives of the Saints. But he could hardly have known this when he wrote. Berceo, who appears to have written more than thir1 Sanchez-Ochoa, op. cit., pp. 577-579. Berceo. teen thousand lines, wrote nothing secular; and though the religious poetry of the Middle Ages is occasionally of the highest order, yet when it is of that rank it is almost invariably Latin, not vernacular, while its vernacular expression, even where not despicable, is apt to be very much of a piece, and to present very few features of literary as distinguished from philological interest. Historians have, however, very properly noted in him the occurrence of a short lyrical fragment in irregular octosyllabics, each rhymed in couplets and interspersed after every line with a refrain. The only certain fact of his life seems to be his ordination as deacon in 1221. Alfonso el Of King Alfonso the Learned (for he does not seem to have been by any means very wise) much more is of course known, though the saying about the blessedness of having no history is not falsified in his case. But his titular enjoyment of the empire, his difficulties with his sons, his death, practically dethroned, and the rest, do not concern us: nor does even his famous and rather wickedly wrested saying (a favourite with Carlyle) about the creation of the world and the possibility of improvement therein had the Creator taken advice. Even the far more deservedly famous Siete Partidas, with that Fuero Juzgo in which, though it was issued in his father's time, he is supposed to have had a hand, are merely noteworthy here as early, curious, and, especially in the case of the Partidas, excellent specimens of Spanish prose in its earliest form. He could not have executed these or any great part of them himself: and the great bulk of the other work attributed to him must also have been really that of collaborators or secretaries. The verse part of this is not extensive, consisting of a collection of Cantigas or hymns, Provençal in style and (to the puzzlement of historians) Galician rather than Castilian in dialect, and an alchemical medley of verse and prose called the Tesoro. These, if they be his, he may have written for himself and by himself. But for his Astronomical Tables, a not unimportant point de repère in astronomical history, he must, as for the legal works already mentioned and others, have been largely indebted. There seems to be much doubt about a prose Trésor, which is or is not a translation of the famous work of Brunetto Latini (dates would here seem awkward). But the Cronica General de España, the Spanish Bible, the Universal History, and the Gran Conquesta de Ultramar (this last a History of the Crusades, based partly on William of Tyre, partly on the chanson cycle of the Crusades, fables and all) must necessarily be his only in the sense that he very likely commissioned, and not improbably assisted in them. The width and variety of the attributions, whether contestable in parts or not, prove quite sufficiently for our purpose this fact, that by his time (he died in 1284) literature of nearly all kinds was being pretty busily cultivated in the Spanish vernaculars, though in this case as in others it might chiefly occupy itself with translations or adaptations of Latin or of French. This fact in general, and the capital and interesting phenomenon of the Poema del Cid in particular, are |