"Hybalos ver el Rey Alfonso.
Dixieron los del Campeador,"
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[198] 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
En era de mill e cc ... xlv. años,"
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 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 French-Latin 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.
Apollonius and Mary of Egypt.
The Spanish Apollonius,[199] however, is noteworthy, because it is written in a form which is also used by Berceo, and which has sometimes been 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,"[200] on the other hand, is in octosyllabic couplets, treated with the same freedom that we find in contemporary German handlings of 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 piece[201] 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.