All folk-poets, and notably the English, have recourse to an occasional assonant, but the Spaniard can trust altogether to such. Verse-making is thus made easy, provided ideas do not fail, and up to to-day, they have not failed the Spanish peasant. He has not, like the Italian, begun to leave off composing songs. My correspondent at Malaga writes that at that place improvisation seems innate in the people: they go before a house and sing the commonest thing they wish to express. Love and hate they also turn into songs, to be rehearsed under the window of the individual loved or hated. There is even an old woman now living in Malaga who rhymes in Latin with extraordinary facility. To the present section falls one other lullaby—coo-aby, perhaps I ought to say, since the Spanish arrullo means the cooing of doves as well as the lulling of children. It is quoted by Count Gubernatis:
Isabellita, do not pine
Because the flowers fade away;
If flowers hasten to decay
Weep not, Isabellita mine.
Little one, now close thine eyes,
Hark, the footsteps of the Moor!
And she asks from door to door,
Who may be the child who cries?
When I was as small as thou