There was, no doubt, difficulty in such a protracted system of rhyme, but not much; and when rhyme first appeared in the modern languages, an excess of it was the natural consequence of its novelty. In large portions of the Provençal poetry, its abundance is quite ridiculous; as in the “Croisade contre les Hérétiques Albigeois,”—a remarkable poem, dating from 1210, excellently edited by M. C. Fauriel, (Paris, 1837, 4to,)—in which stanzas occur where the same rhyme is repeated above a hundred times. When and where this quaternion rhyme, as it is used by Berceo, was first introduced, cannot be determined; but it seems to have been very early employed in poems that were to be publicly recited. (F. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, Wien. 1841, 8vo, p. 257.) The oldest example I know of it, in a modern dialect, dates from about 1100, and is found in the curious MS. of Poetry of the Waldenses (F. Diez, Troubadours, Zwickau, 1826, 8vo, p. 230) used by Raynouard;—the instance to which I refer being “Lo novel Confort,” (Poésies des Troubadours, Paris, 1817, 8vo, Tom. II. p. 111,) which begins,—
Aquest novel confort de vertuos lavor
Mando, vos scrivent en carita et en amor:
Prego vos carament per l’amor del segnor,
Abandona lo segle, serve a Dio cum temor.
In Spain, whither it no doubt came from Provence, its history is simply,—that it occurs in the poem of Apollonius; that it gets its first known date in Berceo about 1230; and that it continued in use till the end of the fourteenth century.
The thirteen thousand verses of Berceo’s poetry, including even the Hymns, are, with the exception of about twenty lines of the “Duelo de la Vírgen,” in this measure. These twenty lines constitute a song of the Jews who watched the sepulchre after the crucifixion, and, like the parts of the demons in the old Mysteries, are intended to be droll, but are, in fact, as Berceo himself says of them, more truly than perhaps he was aware, “not worth three figs.” They are, however, of some consequence, as perhaps the earliest specimen of Spanish lyrical poetry that has come down to us with a date. They begin thus:—
Velat, aliama de los Judios,
Eya velar!
Que no vos furten el fijo de Dios,