[24] The only knowledge of the manuscript containing these three poems was long derived from a few extracts in the “Biblioteca Española” of Rodriguez de Castro;—an important work, whose author was born in Galicia, in 1739, and died at Madrid, in 1799. The first volume, printed in 1781, in folio, under the patronage of the Count Florida Blanca, consists of a chronological account of the Rabbinical writers who appeared in Spain from the earliest times to his own, whether they wrote in Hebrew, Spanish, or any other language. The second, printed in 1786, consists of a similar account of the Spanish writers, heathen and Christian, who wrote either in Latin or in Spanish down to the end of the thirteenth century, and whose number he makes about two hundred. Both volumes are somewhat inartifically compiled, and the literary opinions they express are of small value; but their materials, largely derived from manuscripts, are curious, and frequently such as can be found in print nowhere else.
In this work, (Madrid, 1786, fol., Vol. II. pp. 504, 505,) and for a long time, as I have said, there alone, were found notices of these poems; but all of them were printed at the end of the Paris edition of Sanchez’s “Coleccion de Poesías Anteriores al Siglo XV.,” from a copy of the original manuscript in the Escurial, marked there III. K. 4to. Judging by the specimens given in De Castro, the spelling of the manuscript has not been carefully followed in the copy used for the Paris edition.
[25] The story of Apollonius, Prince of Tyre, as it is commonly called, and as we have its incidents in this long poem, is the 153d tale of the “Gesta Romanorum” (s. l., 1488, fol.). It is, however, much older than that collection. (Douce, Illustrations of Shakspeare, London, 1807, 8vo, Vol. II. p. 135; and Swan’s translation of the Gesta, London, 1824, 12mo, Vol. II. pp. 164-495.) Two words in the original Spanish of the passage translated in the text should be explained. The author says,—
Estudiar querria
Componer un romance de nueva maestría.
Romance here evidently means story, and this is the earliest use of the word in this sense that I know of. Maestría, like our old English Maisterie, means art or skill, as in Chaucer, being the word afterwards corrupted into Mystery.
[26] St. Mary of Egypt was a saint of great repute in Spain and Portugal, and had her adventures written by Pedro de Ribadeneyra in 1609, and Diogo Vas Carrillo in 1673; they were also fully given in the “Flos Sanctorum” of the former, and, in a more attractive form, by Bartolomé Cayrasco de Figueroa, at the end of his “Templo Militante,” (Valladolid, 1602, 12mo,) where they fill about 130 flowing octave stanzas, and by Montalvan, in the drama of “La Gitana de Menfis.” She has, too, a church dedicated to her at Rome on the bank of the Tiber, made out of the graceful ruins of the temple of Fortuna Virilis. But her coarse history has often been rejected as apocryphal, or at least as unfit to be repeated. Bayle, Dictionaire Historique et Critique, Amsterdam, 1740, fol., Tom. III. pp. 334-336.
[27] Both of the last poems in this MS. were first printed by Pidal in the Revista de Madrid, 1841, and, as it would seem, from bad copies. At least, they contain many more inaccuracies of spelling, versification, and style than the first, and appear to be of a later age; for I do not think the French Fabliaux, which they imitate, were known in Spain till after the period commonly assigned to the Apollonius.
[28] It is in Sta. Oria, st. 2.
Quiero en mi vegez, maguer so ya cansado,