[341] Don Quixote, part ii. chap. ix.
[347] Senhor is the Portuguese or Galician form. Borrow has now crossed the frontier.
[351] It is possibly an older language than either. It resembles rather the Portuguese than the Spanish, and is of great interest in many ways. The great religious poem of Alfonso X., Los Loores y Milagros de Nuestra Señora, written between 1263 and 1284, when the national language was hardly formed, was written in Galician, though from the beginning of the fourteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century little attention was paid to the literary language. Within the last few years a species of provincial revival has taken place, and the following works among others have been published in and about the language of Galicia: (1) D. Juan Saco Arce, Gramatica Gallega (Lugo, 1868), with an appendix of proverbs and popular songs; (2) Fernandez y Morales, Ensayos poeticos, edited by Don Mariano Cubi y Soler; (3) A. G. Besada, Historia critica de la literatura gallega (La Coruña, 1887); the works of Manuel Murginà, also published at La Coruña; Don Juan Cuveiro Piñol’s Diccionario Gallego and El habla, both published at Barcelona in 1876; and, best of all, Don Manuel Nuñez Valladares’ Diccionario Gallego-Castillano (Santiago, 1884).
[353] “I believe it!”
[359] This is a curious blunder. Lucus Augusti was not only never capital of Roman Spain, but the capital only of Northern Gallaecia, or Galicia; as Bracara Augusta, or Braga, was the chief town and seat of a Conventus Juridicus of southern Galicia, the Minho being the boundary of the northern and southern divisions of the province.
Roman Spain was at no time a province, but included, from b.c. 205 to a.d. 325, many provinces, each with its own provincial capital. In the division of the Roman world by Constantine, Hispania first became an administrative unit as a diocese in the Prefecture of Gaul, with its capital at Hispalis or Seville, the residence of the Imperial Vicar (see Burke’s History of Spain, vol. i. pp. 31, 35, 36).
[360] “Woe is me, O God!”
[361] Combats with young bulls, usually by amateur fighters. Although the animals are immature, and the tips of their horns, moreover, sawn off to make the sport less dangerous, accidents are far more common than in the more serious corridas, where the professionals take no step without due deliberation and secundum artem. Novillo, of course, means only a young bull; but in common parlance in Spain los toros means necessarily a serious bull-fight, and los novillos an amateur exhibition.
[363] See note on p. 340.
[365] Span. anis (see Glossary).