CHAPTER VII.
Ballads on Subjects connected with Chivalry. — Ballads from Spanish History. — Bernardo del Carpio. — Fernan Gonzalez. — The Lords of Lara. — The Cid. — Ballads from Ancient History and Fable, Sacred and Profane. — Ballads on Moorish Subjects. — Miscellaneous Ballads, Amatory, Burlesque, Satirical, etc. — Character of the old Spanish Ballads.
Ballads of Chivalry.—The first thing that strikes us, on opening any one of the old Spanish ballad-books, is the national air and spirit that prevail throughout them. But we look in vain for many of the fictions found in the popular poetry of other countries at the same period, some of which we might well expect to find here. Even that chivalry, which was so akin to the character and condition of Spain when the ballads appeared, fails to sweep by us with the train of its accustomed personages. Of Arthur and his Round Table the old ballads tell us nothing at all, nor of the “Mervaile of the Graal,” nor of Perceval, nor of the Palmerins, nor of many other well-known and famous heroes of the shadow land of chivalry. Later, indeed, some of these personages figure largely in the Spanish prose romances. But, for a long time, the history of Spain itself furnished materials enough for its more popular poetry; and therefore, though Amadis, Lancelot du Lac, Tristan de Leonnais, and their compeers, present themselves now and then in the ballads, it is not till after the prose romances, filled with their adventures, had made them familiar. Even then, they are somewhat awkwardly introduced, and never occupy any well-defined place; for the stories of the Cid and Bernardo del Carpio were much nearer to the hearts of the Spanish people, and had left little space for such comparatively cold and unsubstantial fancies.
The only considerable exception to this remark is to be found in the stories connected with Charlemagne and his peers. That great sovereign—who, in the darkest period of Europe since the days of the Roman republic, roused up the nations, not only by the glory of his military conquests, but by the magnificence of his civil institutions—crossed the Pyrenees in the latter part of the eighth century, at the solicitation of one of his Moorish allies, and ravaged the Spanish marches as far as the Ebro, taking Pamplona and Saragossa.[202] The impression he made there seems to have been the same he made everywhere; and from this time the splendor of his great name and deeds was connected in the minds of the Spanish people with wild imaginations of their own achievements, and gave birth to that series of fictions which is embraced in the story of Bernardo del Carpio, and ends with the great rout, when, according to the persuasions of the national vanity,
“Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabbia.”
These picturesque adventures, chiefly without countenance from history, in which the French paladins appear associated with fabulous Spanish heroes, such as Montesinos and Durandarte,[203] and once with the noble Moor Calaynos, are represented with some minuteness in the old Spanish ballads. The largest number, including the longest and the best, are to be found in the ballad-book of 1550-1555, to which may be added a few from that of 1593-1597, making together somewhat more than fifty, of which only twenty occur in the collection expressly devoted to the Twelve Peers, and first published in 1608. Some of them are evidently very old; as, for instance, that on the Conde d’ Irlos, that on the Marquis of Mantua, two on Claros of Montalban, and both the fragments on Durandarte, the last of which can be traced back to the Cancionero of 1511.[204]
The ballads of this class are occasionally quite long, and approach the character of the old French and English metrical romances; that of the Conde d’ Irlos extending to about thirteen hundred lines. The longer ballads, too, are generally the best; and those, through large portions of which the same asonante, and sometimes, even, the same consonante or full rhyme, is continued to the end, have a solemn harmony in their protracted cadences, that produces an effect on the feelings like the chanting of a rich and well-sustained recitative.
Taken as a body, they have a grave tone, combined with the spirit of a picturesque narrative, and entirely different from the extravagant and romantic air afterwards given to the same class of fictions in Italy, and even from that of the few Spanish ballads which, at a later period, were constructed out of the imaginative and fantastic materials found in the poems of Bojardo and Ariosto. But in all ages and in all forms, they have been favorites with the Spanish people. They were alluded to as such above five hundred years ago, in the oldest of the national chronicles; and when, at the end of the last century, Sarmiento notices the ballad-book of the Twelve Peers, he speaks of it as one which the peasantry and the children of Spain still knew by heart.[205]
Historical Ballads.—The most important and the largest division of the Spanish ballads is, however, the historical. Nor is this surprising. The early heroes in Spanish history grew so directly out of the popular character, and the early achievements of the national arms so nearly touched the personal condition of every Christian in the Peninsula, that they naturally became the first and chief subjects of a poetry which has always, to a remarkable degree, been the breathing of the popular feelings and passions. It would be easy, therefore, to collect a series of ballads,—few in number as far as respects the Gothic and Roman periods, but ample from the time of Roderic and the Moorish conquest of Spain down to the moment when its restoration was gloriously fulfilled in the fall of Granada,—a series which would constitute such a poetical illustration of Spanish history as can be brought in aid of the history of no other country. But, for our present purpose, it is enough to select a few sketches from these remarkable ballads devoted to the greater heroes,—personages half-shadowy, half-historical,—who, between the end of the eighth and the beginning of the twelfth century, occupy a wide space in all the old traditions, and serve alike to illustrate the early popular character in Spain, and the poetry to which that character gave birth.
The first of these, in the order of time, is Bernardo del Carpio, concerning whom we have about forty ballads, which, with the accounts in the Chronicle of Alfonso the Wise, have constituted the foundations for many a drama and tale, and at least three long heroic poems. According to these early narratives, Bernardo flourished about the year 800, and was the offspring of a secret marriage between the Count de Saldaña and the sister of Alfonso the Chaste, at which the king was so much offended, that he kept the Count in perpetual imprisonment, and sent the Infanta to a convent; educating Bernardo as his own son, and keeping him ignorant of his birth. The achievements of Bernardo, ending with the victory of Roncesvalles,—his efforts to procure the release of his father, when he learns who his father is,—the falsehood of the king, who promises repeatedly to give up the Count de Saldaña and as often breaks his word,—with the despair of Bernardo, and his final rebellion, after the Count’s death in prison,—are all as fully represented in the ballads as they are in the chronicles, and constitute some of the most romantic and interesting portions of each.[206]
Of the ballads which contain this story, and which generally suppose the whole of it to have passed in one reign, though the Chronicle spreads it over three, none, perhaps, is finer than the one in which the Count de Saldaña, in his solitary prison, complains of his son, who, he supposes, must know his descent, and of his wife, the Infanta, who, he presumes, must be in league with her royal brother. After a description of the castle in which he is confined, the Count says:—
The tale of my imprisoned life
Within these loathsome walls,
Each moment, as it lingers by,
My hoary hair recalls;
For when this castle first I saw,
My beard was scarcely grown,
And now, to purge my youthful sins,
Its folds hang whitening down.
Then where art thou, my careless son?
And why so dull and cold?
Doth not my blood within thee run?
Speaks it not loud and bold?
Alas! it may be so, but still
Thy mother’s blood is thine;
And what is kindred to the king
Will plead no cause of mine:
And thus all three against me stand;—
For the whole man to quell,
’T is not enough to have our foes,
Our heart’s blood must rebel.
Meanwhile, the guards that watch me here
Of thy proud conquests boast;
But if for me thou lead’st it not,
For whom, then, fights thy host?
And since thou leav’st me prisoned here,
In cruel chains to groan,
Or I must be a guilty sire,
Or thou a guilty son!
Yet pardon me, if I offend
By uttering words so free;
For while oppressed with age I moan,
No words come back from thee.[207]
The old Spanish ballads have often a resemblance to each other in their tone and phraseology; and occasionally several seem imitated from some common original. Thus, in another, on this same subject of the Count de Saldaña’s imprisonment, we find the length of time he had suffered, and the idea of his relationship and blood, enforced in the following words, not of the Count himself, but of Bernardo, when addressing the king:—
The very walls are wearied there,
So long in grief to hold
A man whom first in youth they saw,
And now see gray and old.
And if, for errors such as these,
The forfeit must be blood,
Enough of his has flowed from me,
When for your rights I stood.[208]
In reading the ballads relating to Bernardo del Carpio, it is impossible not to be often struck with their resemblance to the corresponding passages of the “General Chronicle.” Some of them are undoubtedly copied from it; others possibly may have been, in more ancient forms, among the poetical materials out of which we know that Chronicle was in part composed.[209] The best are those which are least strictly conformed to the history itself; but all, taken together, form a curious and interesting series, that serves strikingly to exhibit the manners and feelings of the people in the wild times of which they speak, as well as in the later periods when many of them must have been written.
The next series is that on Fernan Gonzalez, a popular chieftain, whom we have already mentioned, when noticing his metrical chronicle; and one who, in the middle of the tenth century, recovered Castile anew from the Moors, and became its first sovereign Count. The number of ballads relating to him is not large; probably not twenty. The most poetical are those which describe his being twice rescued from prison by his courageous wife, and those which relate his contest with King Sancho, where he displayed all the turbulence and cunning of a robber baron, in the Middle Ages. Nearly all their facts may be found in the Third Part of the “General Chronicle”; and though only a few of the ballads themselves appear to be derived from it as distinctly as some of those on Bernardo del Carpio, still two or three are evidently indebted to that Chronicle for their materials and phraseology, while yet others may possibly, in some ruder shape, have preceded it, and contributed to its composition.[210]
The ballads which naturally form the next group are those on the Seven Lords of Lara, who lived in the time of Garcia Ferrandez, the son of Fernan Gonzalez. Some of them are beautiful, and the story they contain is one of the most romantic in Spanish history. The seven Lords of Lara, in consequence of a family quarrel, are betrayed by their uncle into the hands of the Moors, and put to death; while their father, by the basest treason, is confined in a Moorish prison, where, by a noble Moorish lady, he has an eighth son, the famous Mudarra, who at last avenges all the wrongs of his race. On this story there are about thirty ballads; some very old, and exhibiting either inventions or traditions not elsewhere recorded, while others seem to have come directly from the “General Chronicle.” The following is a part of one of the last, and a good specimen of the whole:—[211]
What knight goes there, so false and fair,
That thus for treason stood?
Velasquez hight is that false knight,
Who sold his brother’s blood.
Where Almenar extends afar,
He called his nephews forth,
And on that plain he bade them gain
A name of fame and worth.
The Moors he shows, the common foes,
And promises their rout;
But while they stood, prepared for blood,
A mighty host came out.
Of Moorish men were thousands ten,
With pennons flowing fair;
Whereat each knight, as well he might,
Inquired what host came there.
“O, do not fear, my kinsmen dear,”
The base Velasquez cried,
“The Moors you see can never be
Of power your shock to bide;
I oft have met their craven set,
And none dared face my might;
So think no fear, my kinsmen dear,
But boldly seek the fight.”
Thus words deceive, and men believe,
And falsehood thrives amain;
And those brave knights, for Christian rights,
Have sped across the plain;
And men ten score, but not one more,
To follow freely chose:
So Velasquez base his kin and race
Has bartered to their foes.
But, as might be anticipated, the Cid was seized upon with the first formation of the language as the subject of popular poetry, and has been the occasion of more ballads than any other of the great heroes of Spanish history or fable.[212] They were first collected in a separate ballad-book as early as 1612, and have continued to be published and republished at home and abroad down to our own times.[213] It would be easy to find a hundred and sixty; some of them very ancient; some poetical; many prosaic and poor. The chronicles seem to have been little resorted to in their composition.[214] The circumstances of the Cid’s history, whether true or fictitious, were too well settled in the popular faith, and too familiar to all Christian Spaniards, to render the use of such materials necessary. No portion of the old ballads, therefore, is more strongly marked with the spirit of their age and country; and none constitutes a series so complete. They give us apparently the whole of the Cid’s history, which we find nowhere else entire; neither in the ancient poem, which does not pretend to be a life of him; nor in the prose chronicle, which does not begin so early in his story; nor in the Latin document, which is too brief and condensed. At the very outset, we have the following minute and living picture of the mortification and sufferings of Diego Laynez, the Cid’s father, in consequence of the blow he had received from Count Lozano, which his age rendered it impossible for him to avenge:—
Sorrowing old Laynez sat,
Sorrowing on the deep disgrace
Of his house, so rich and knightly,
Older than Abarca’s race.
For he saw that youthful strength
To avenge his wrong was needed;
That, by years enfeebled, broken,
None his arm now feared or heeded.
But he of Orgaz, Count Lozano,
Walks secure where men resort;
Hindered and rebuked by none,
Proud his name, and proud his port.
While he, the injured, neither sleeps,
Nor tastes the needful food,
Nor from the ground dares lift his eyes,
Nor moves a step abroad,
Nor friends in friendly converse meets,
But hides in shame his face;
His very breath, he thinks, offends,
Charged with insult and disgrace.[215]
In this state of his father’s feelings, Roderic, a mere stripling, determines to avenge the insult by challenging Count Lozano, then the most dangerous knight and the first nobleman in the kingdom. The result is the death of his proud and injurious enemy; but the daughter of the fallen Count, the fair Ximena, demands vengeance of the king, and the whole is adjusted, after the rude fashion of those times, by a marriage between the parties, which necessarily ends the feud.
The ballads, thus far, relate only to the early youth of the Cid in the reign of Ferdinand the Great, and constitute a separate series, that gave to Guillen de Castro, and after him to Corneille, the best materials for their respective tragedies on this part of the Cid’s story. But at the death of Ferdinand, his kingdom was divided, according to his will, among his four children; and then we have another series of ballads on the part taken by the Cid in the wars almost necessarily produced by such a division, and in the siege of Zamora, which fell to the share of Queen Urraca, and was assailed by her brother, Sancho the Brave. In one of these ballads, the Cid, sent by Sancho to summon the city, is thus reproached and taunted by Urraca, who is represented as standing on one of its towers, and answering him as he addressed her from below:—
Away! away! proud Roderic!
Castilian proud, away!
Bethink thee of that olden time,
That happy, honored day,
When, at Saint James’s holy shrine,
Thy knighthood first was won;
When Ferdinand, my royal sire,
Confessed thee for a son.
He gave thee then thy knightly arms,
My mother gave thy steed;
Thy spurs were buckled by these hands,
That thou no grace might’st need.
And had not chance forbid the vow,
I thought with thee to wed;
But Count Lozano’s daughter fair
Thy happy bride was led.
With her came wealth, an ample store,
But power was mine, and state:
Broad lands are good, and have their grace,
But he that reigns is great.
Thy wife is well; thy match was wise;
Yet, Roderic! at thy side
A vassal’s daughter sits by thee,
And not a royal bride![216]
Alfonso the Sixth succeeded on the death of Sancho, who perished miserably by treason before the walls of Zamora; but the Cid quarrelled with his new master, and was exiled. At this moment begins the old poem already mentioned; but even here and afterwards the ballads form a more continuous account of his life, carrying us, often with great minuteness of detail, through his conquest of Valencia, his restoration to the king’s favor, his triumph over the Counts of Carrion, his old age, death, and burial, and giving us, when taken together, what Müller the historian and Herder the philosopher consider, in its main circumstances, a trustworthy history, but what can hardly be more than a poetical version of traditions current at the different times when its different portions were composed.
Indeed, in the earlier part of the period when historical ballads were written, their subjects seem rather to have been chosen among the traditional heroes of the country, than among the known and ascertained events in its annals. Much fiction, of course, was mingled with whatever related to such personages by the willing credulity of patriotism, and portions of the ballads about them are incredible to any modern faith; so that we can hardly fail to agree with the good sense of the canon in Don Quixote, when he says, “There is no doubt there was such a man as the Cid and such a man as Bernardo del Carpio, but much doubt whether they achieved what is imputed to them”;[217] while, at the same time, we must admit there is no less truth in the shrewd intimation of Sancho, that, after all, the old ballads are too old to tell lies. At least, some of them are so.
At a later period, all sorts of subjects were introduced into the ballads; ancient subjects as well as modern, sacred as well as profane. Even the Greek and Roman fables were laid under contribution, as if they were historically true; but more ballads are connected with Spanish history than with any other, and, in general, they are better. The most striking peculiarity of the whole mass is, perhaps, to be found in the degree in which it expresses the national character. Loyalty is constantly prominent. The Lord of Buitrago sacrifices his own life to save that of his sovereign.[218] The Cid sends rich spoils from his conquests in Valencia to the ungrateful king who had driven him thither as an exile.[219] Bernardo del Carpio bows in submission to the uncle who basely and brutally outrages his filial affections;[220] and when, driven to despair, he rebels, the ballads and the chronicles absolutely forsake him. In short, this and the other strong traits of the national character are constantly appearing in the old historical ballads, and constitute a chief part of the peculiar charm that invests them.
Ballads on Moorish Subjects.—The Moorish ballads form a brilliant and large class by themselves, but none of them are as old as the earliest historical ballads. Indeed, their very subjects intimate their later origin. Few can be found alluding to known events or personages that occur before the period immediately preceding the fall of Granada; and even in these few the proofs of a more recent and Christian character are abundant. The truth appears to be, that, after the final overthrow of the Moorish power, when the conquerors for the first time came into full possession of whatever was most luxurious in the civilization of their enemies, the tempting subjects their situation suggested were at once seized upon by the spirit of their popular poetry. The sweet South, with its picturesque, though effeminate, refinement; the foreign, yet not absolutely stranger, manners of its people; its magnificent and fantastic architecture; the stories of the warlike achievements and disasters at Baza, at Ronda, and at Alhama, with the romantic adventures and fierce feuds of the Zegris and Abencerrages, the Gomeles and the Aliatares;—all took strong hold of the Spanish imagination, and made of Granada, its rich plain and snowcapped mountains, that fairy land which the elder and sterner ballad poetry of the North had failed to create. From this time, therefore, we find a new class of subjects, such as the loves of Gazul and Abindarraez, with games and tournaments in the Bivarrambla, and tales of Arabian nights in the Generalife; in short, whatever was matter of Moorish tradition or manners, or might by the popular imagination be deemed such, was wrought into Spanish ballad poetry, until the very excess became ridiculous, and the ballads themselves laughed at one another for deserting their own proper subjects, and becoming, as it were, renegades to nationality and patriotism.[221]
The period when this style of poetry came into favor was the century that elapsed after the fall of Granada; the same in which all classes of the ballads were first written down and printed. The early collections give full proof of this. Those of 1511 and 1550 contain several Moorish ballads, and that of 1593 contains above two hundred. But though their subjects involve known occurrences, they are hardly ever really historical; as, for instance, the well-known ballad on the tournament in Toledo, which is supposed to have happened before the year 1085, while its names belong to the period immediately preceding the fall of Granada; and the ballad of King Belchite, which, like many others, has a subject purely imaginary. Indeed, this romantic character is the prevalent one in the ballads of this class, and gives them much of their interest; a fact well illustrated by that beginning “The star of Venus rises now,” which is one of the best and most consistent in the “Romancero General,” and yet, by its allusions to Venus and to Rodamonte, and its mistake in supposing a Moor to have been Alcayde of Seville, a century after Seville had become a Christian city, shows that there was, in its composition, no serious thought of any thing but poetical effect.[222]
These, with some of the ballads on the famous Gazul, occur in the popular story of the “Wars of Granada,” where they are treated as if contemporary with the facts they record, and are beautiful specimens of the poetry which the Spanish imagination delighted to connect with that most glorious event in the national history.[223] Others can be found in a similar tone on the stories, partly or wholly fabulous, of Muça, Xarifé, Lisaro, and Tarfé; while yet others, in greater number, belong to the treasons and rivalries, the plots and adventures, of the more famous Zegris and Abencerrages, which, as far as they are founded in fact, show how internal dissensions, no less than external disasters, prepared the way for the final overthrow of the Moorish empire. Some of them were probably written in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella; many more in the time of Charles the Fifth; the most brilliant, but not the best, somewhat later.
Ballads on Manners and Private Life.—But the ballad poetry of Spain was not confined to heroic subjects drawn from romance or history, or to subjects depending on Moorish traditions and manners; and therefore, though these are the three largest classes into which it is divided, there is yet a fourth, which may be called miscellaneous, and which is of no little moment. For, in truth, the poetical feelings even of the lower portions of the Spanish people were spread out over more subjects than we should anticipate; and their genius, which, from the first, had a charter as free as the wind, has thus left us a vast number of records, that prove at least the variety of the popular perceptions, and the quickness and tenderness of the popular sensibility. Many of the miscellaneous ballads thus produced—perhaps most of them—are effusions of love; but many are pastoral, many are burlesque, satirical, and picaresque; many are called Letrillas, but have nothing epistolary about them except the name; many are lyrical in their tone, if not in their form; and many are descriptive of the manners and amusements of the people at large. But one characteristic runs through the whole of them. They are true representations of Spanish life. Some of those first printed have already been referred to; but there is a considerable class marked by an attractive simplicity of thought and expression, united to a sort of mischievous shrewdness, that should be particularly noticed. No such popular poetry exists in any other language. A number of these ballads occur in the peculiarly valuable Sixth Part of the Romancero, that appeared in 1594, and was gathered by Pedro Flores, as he himself tells us, in part least, from the memories of the common people.[224] They remind us not unfrequently of the lighter poetry of the Archpriest of Hita in the middle of the fourteenth century, and may, probably, be traced back in their tone and spirit to a yet earlier period. Indeed, they are quite a prominent and charming part of all the earliest Romanceros, not a few of them being as simple, and yet as shrewd and humorous, as the following, in which an elder sister is represented lecturing a younger one, on first noticing in her the symptoms of love:—
Her sister Miguela
Once child little Jane,
And the words that she spoke
Gave a great deal of pain.
“You went yesterday playing,
A child like the rest;
And now you come out,
More than other girls dressed.
“You take pleasure in sighs,
In sad music delight;
With the dawning you rise,
Yet sit up half the night.
“When you take up your work,
You look vacant and stare,
And gaze on your sampler,
But miss the stitch there.
“You’re in love, people say,
Your actions all show it;—
New ways we shall have,
When mother shall know it.
“She’ll nail up the windows,
And lock up the door;
Leave to frolic and dance
She will give us no more.
“Old aunt will be sent
To take us to mass,
And stop all our talk
With the girls as we pass.
“And when we walk out,
She will bid our old shrew
Keep a faithful account
Of what our eyes do;
“And mark who goes by,
If I peep through the blind,
And be sure and detect us
In looking behind.
“Thus for your idle follies
Must I suffer too,
And, though nothing I’ve done,
Be punished like you.”
“O sister Miguela,
Your chiding pray spare;—
That I’ve troubles you guess,
But not what they are.
“Young Pedro it is,
Old Juan’s fair youth;
But he’s gone to the wars,
And where is his truth?
“I loved him sincerely,
I loved all he said;
But I fear he is fickle,
I fear he is fled!
“He is gone of free choice,
Without summons or call,
And ’t is foolish to love him,
Or like him at all.”
“Nay, rather do thou
To God pray above,
Lest Pedro return,
And again you should love,”
Said Miguela in jest,
As she answered poor Jane;
“For when love has been bought
At cost of such pain,
“What hope is there, sister,
Unless the soul part,
That the passion you cherish
Should yield up your heart?
“Your years will increase,
But so will your pains,
And this you may learn
From the proverb’s old strains:—
“‘If, when but a child,
Love’s power you own,
Pray, what will you do
When you older are grown?’”[225]
A single specimen like this, however, can give no idea of the great variety in the class of ballads to which it belongs, nor of their poetical beauty. To feel their true value and power, we must read large numbers of them, and read them, too, in their native language; for there is a winning freshness in the originals, as they lie imbedded in the old Romanceros, that escapes in translations, however free or however strict;—a remark that should be extended to the historical as well as the miscellaneous portions of that great mass of popular poetry which is found in the early ballad-books, and which, though it is all nearly three centuries old, and some of it older, has been much less carefully considered than it deserves to be.
Yet there are certainly few portions of the literature of any country that will better reward a spirit of adventurous inquiry than these ancient Spanish ballads, in all their forms. In many respects, they are unlike the earliest narrative poetry of any other part of the world; in some, they are better. The English and Scotch ballads, with which they may most naturally be compared, belong to a ruder state of society, where a personal coarseness and violence prevailed, which did not, indeed, prevent the poetry it produced from being full of energy, and sometimes of tenderness, but which necessarily had less dignity and elevation than belong to the character, if not the condition, of a people who, like the Spanish, were for centuries engaged in a contest ennobled by a sense of religion and loyalty; a contest which could not fail sometimes to raise the minds and thoughts of those engaged in it far above such an atmosphere as settled round the bloody feuds of rival barons or the gross maraudings of a border warfare. The truth of this will at once be felt, if we compare the striking series of ballads on Robin Hood with those on the Cid and Bernardo del Carpio; or if we compare the deep tragedy of Edom o’ Gordon with that of the Conde Alarcos; or what would be better than either, if we would sit down to the “Romancero General,” with its poetical confusion of Moorish splendors and Christian loyalty, just when we have come fresh from Percy’s “Reliques,” or Scott’s “Minstrelsy.”[226]
But, besides what the Spanish ballads possess different from the popular poetry of the rest of Europe, they exhibit, as no others exhibit it, that nationality which is the truest element of such poetry everywhere. They seem, indeed, as we read them, to be often little more than the great traits of the old Spanish character brought out by the force of poetical enthusiasm; so that, if their nationality were taken away from them, they would cease to exist. This, in its turn, has preserved them down to the present day, and will continue to preserve them hereafter. The great Castilian heroes, such as the Cid, Bernardo del Carpio, and Pelayo, are even now an essential portion of the faith and poetry of the common people of Spain; and are still, in some degree, honored as they were honored in the age of the Great Captain, or, farther back, in that of Saint Ferdinand. The stories of Guarinos, too, and of the defeat of Roncesvalles are still sung by the wayfaring muleteers, as they were when Don Quixote heard them in his journeying to Toboso; and the showmen still rehearse the adventures of Gayferos and Melisendra, in the streets of Seville, as they did at the solitary inn of Montesinos, when he encountered them there. In short, the ancient Spanish ballads are so truly national in their spirit, that they became at once identified with the popular character that had produced them, and with that same character will go onward, we doubt not, till the Spanish people shall cease to have a separate and independent existence.[227]