The next poem in the collection is called “The Life of our Lady, Saint Mary of Egypt,”—a saint formerly much more famous than she is now, and one whose history is so coarse and indecent, that it has often been rejected by the wiser members of the church that canonized her. Such as it appears in the old traditions, however, with all its sins upon its head, it is here set forth. But we notice at once a considerable difference between the composition of its verse and that of any Castilian poetry assigned to the same or an earlier period. It is written in short lines, generally of eight syllables, and in couplets; but sometimes a single line carelessly runs out to the number of ten or eleven syllables; and, in a few instances, three or even four lines are included in one rhyme. It has a light air, quite unlike the stateliness of the Poem of the Cid, and seems, from its verse and tone, as well as from a few French words scattered through it, to have been borrowed from some of the earlier French Fabliaux, or, at any rate, to have been written in imitation of their easy and garrulous style. It opens thus, showing that it was intended for recitation:—
Listen, ye lordlings, listen to me,
For true is my tale, as true can be;
And listen in heart, that so ye may
Have pardon, when humbly to God ye pray.
It consists of fourteen hundred such meagre, monkish verses, and is hardly of importance, except as a monument of the language at the period when it was written.[26]
The last of the three poems is in the same irregular measure and manner. It is called “The Adoration of the Three Holy Kings,” and begins with the old tradition about the wise men that came from the East; but its chief subject is an arrest of the Holy Family, during their flight to Egypt, by robbers, the child of one of whom is cured of a hideous leprosy by being bathed in water previously used for bathing the Saviour; this same child afterwards turning out to be the penitent thief of the crucifixion. It is a rhymed legend of only two hundred and fifty lines, and belongs to the large class of such compositions that were long popular in Western Europe.[27]
Thus far, the poetry of the first century of Spanish literature, like the earliest poetry of other modern countries, is anonymous; for authorship was a distinction rarely coveted or thought of by those who wrote in any of the dialects then forming throughout Europe, among the common people. It is even impossible to tell from what part of the Christian conquests in Spain the poems of which we have spoken have come to us. We may infer, indeed, from their language and tone, that the Poem of the Cid belongs to the border country of the Moorish war in the direction of Catalonia and Valencia, and that the earliest ballads, of which we shall speak hereafter, came originally from the midst of the contest, with whose very spirit they are often imbued. In the same way, too, we may be persuaded that the poems of a more religious temper were produced in the quieter kingdoms of the North, where monasteries had been founded and Christianity had already struck its roots deeply into the soil of the national character. Still, we have no evidence to show where any one of the poems we have thus far noticed was written.
But as we advance, this state of things is changed. The next poetry we meet is by a known author, and, comes from a known locality. It was written by Gonzalo, a secular priest who belonged to the monastery of San Millan or Saint Emilianus, in the territory of Calahorra, far within the borders of the Moorish war, and who is commonly called Berceo, from the place of his birth. Of the poet himself we know little, except that he flourished from 1220 to 1246, and that, as he once speaks of suffering from the weariness of old age,[28] he probably died after 1260, in the reign of Alfonso the Wise.[29]
His works amount to above thirteen thousand lines, and fill an octavo volume.[30] They are all on religious subjects, and consist of rhymed Lives of San Domingo de Silos, Santa Oria, and San Millan; poems on the Mass, the Martyrdom of San Lorenzo, the Merits of the Madonna, the Signs that are to precede the Last Judgment, and the Mourning of the Madonna at the Cross, with a few Hymns, and especially a poem of more than three thousand six hundred lines on the Miracles of the Virgin Mary. With one inconsiderable exception, the whole of this formidable mass of verse is divided into stanzas of four lines each, like those in the poem of Apollonius of Tyre; and though in the language there is a perceptible advance since the days when the Poem of the Cid was written, still the power and movement of that remarkable legend are entirely wanting in the verses of the careful ecclesiastic.[31]