By our youth in crowds distinguished
By a thousand pointed fingers;
He beloved by fairest damsels,
For discretion and politeness,
Cherished son of time and fortune,
Bearing all their gifts divinest,” etc.
Retrospective Review, Vol. IV. p. 35.
Another specimen of English asonantes is to be found in Bowring’s “Ancient Poetry of Spain” (London, 1824, 12mo, p. 107); but the result is substantially the same, and always must be, from the difference between the two languages.
[178] Speaking of the ballad verses, he says, (Prólogo á las Rimas Humanas, Obras Sueltas, Tom. IV., Madrid, 1776, 4to, p. 176,) “I regard them as capable, not only of expressing and setting forth any idea whatever with easy sweetness, but carrying through any grave action in a versified poem.” His prediction was fulfilled in his own time by the “Fernando” of Vera y Figueroa, a long epic published in 1632, and in ours by the very attractive narrative poem of Don Ángel de Saavedra, Duke de Rivas, entitled “El Moro Exposito,” in two volumes, 1834. The example of Lope de Vega, in the latter part of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, no doubt did much to give currency to the asonantes, which, from that time, have been more used than they were earlier.
[179] See the barbarous Latin poem printed by Sandoval, at the end of his “Historia de los Reyes de Castilla,” etc. (Pamplona, 1615, fol., f. 193). It is on the taking of Almeria in 1147, and seems to have been written by an eyewitness.