PLAN AND SECTION OF THE GREAT CISTERN IN THE ALHAMBRA.
APPENDIX.
Moresco-Spanish Ballads.
Selected from the Translations of John Gibson Lockhart.
LOCKHART’S intention was to furnish the English reader with some notion of that old Spanish minstrelsy preserved in the different Cancioneros and Romanceros of the Sixteenth Century; he owns, however, than only a Spaniard can achieve for his native chansons what Percy, Ellis, or Ritson has done for English ballads. Until such a Spanish editor arises, it seems impossible to determine to what period the composition of the oldest Spanish ballads now extant ought to be referred.
The first collection of romantic Spanish ballads, that of Ferdinand de Castillo, was published so early as 1510; and, as the title of the book declares that the volume contains the ancient and modern songs of the Troubadours of Spain, it is clear that a certain number of the pieces were then considered ancient. There are not wanting circumstances which would seem to establish for many of the Spanish ballads a claim to antiquity much higher than is to be inferred from this date; for, in the General Chronicle of Spain, which was compiled in the fourteenth century at the instance of Alfonso the Wise, allusions are constantly made to the popular songs of the minstrels, or Joglares. One thing is certain, that the Spaniards are in possession of the oldest, as well as the largest, collection of popular ballad poetry, properly so called, than is to be found in the literature of any other European nation; and Lockhart very pertinently puts the enquiry, “Had there been published at London, in the reign of our eighth Henry, a vast collection of English ballads about the wars of the Plantagenets, what illustration and annotation would not that collection have received ere now?”
It is fair, perhaps, to conclude that a great and remarkable influence was exerted over Spanish thought and feeling—and, therefore, over Spanish language and poetry—by the influx of those Oriental tribes who occupied, for long centuries, the fairest provinces of Spain; particularly when it is remembered that the Christian youth studied freely and honourably at the feet of Jewish and Mohammedan philosophers.