“Hold this for certain and for fact,
For truth it is and truth exact,
That never Honor and Disgrace
Together sought a resting-place.”
It is not easy to imagine any thing more simple and direct than this story, either in the matter or the style. Others of the tales have an air of more knightly dignity, and some have a little of the gallantry that might be expected from a court like that of Alfonso the Eleventh. In a very few of them, Don John gives intimations that he had risen above the feelings and opinions of his age: as, in one, he laughs at the monks and their pretensions;[116] in another, he introduces a pilgrim under no respectable circumstances;[117] and in a third, he ridicules his uncle Alfonso for believing in the follies of alchemy,[118] and trusting a man who pretended to turn the baser metals into gold. But in almost all we see the large experience of a man of the world, as the world then existed, and the cool observation of one who knew too much of mankind, and had suffered too much from them, to have a great deal of the romance of youth still lingering in his character. For we know, from himself, that Prince John wrote the Conde Lucanor when he had already reached his highest honors and authority; probably after he had passed through his severest defeats. It should be remembered, therefore, to his credit, that we find in it no traces of the arrogance of power, or of the bitterness of mortified ambition; nothing of the wrongs he had suffered from others, and nothing of those he had inflicted. It seems, indeed, to have been written in some happy interval, stolen from the bustle of camps, the intrigues of government, and the crimes of rebellion, when the experience of his past life, its adventures, and its passions, were so remote as to awaken little personal feeling, and yet so familiar that he could give us their results, with great simplicity, in this series of tales and anecdotes, which are marked with an originality that belongs to their age, and with a kind of chivalrous philosophy and wise honesty that would not be discreditable to one more advanced.[119]
CHAPTER V.
Alfonso the Eleventh. — Treatise on Hunting. — Poetical Chronicle. — Beneficiary of Ubeda. — Archpriest of Hita; his Life, Works, and Character. — Rabbi Don Santob. — La Doctrina Christiana. — A Revelation. — La Dança General. — Poem on Joseph. — Ayala; his Rimado de Palacio. — Characteristics of Spanish Literature thus far.
The reign of Alfonso the Eleventh was full of troubles, and the unhappy monarch himself died at last of the plague, while he was besieging Gibraltar, in 1350. Still, that letters were not forgotten in it we know, not only from the example of Don John Manuel, already cited, but from several others which should not be passed over.
The first is a prose treatise on Hunting, in three books, written under the king’s direction, by his Chief-huntsmen, who were then among the principal persons of the court. It consists of little more than an account of the sort of hounds to be used, their diseases and training, with a description of the different places where game was abundant, and where sport for the royal amusement was to be had. It is of small consequence in itself, but was published by Argote de Molina, in the time of Philip the Second, with a pleasant addition by the editor, containing curious stories of lion-hunts and bull-fights, fitting it to the taste of his own age. In style, the original work is as good as the somewhat similar treatise of the Marquis of Villena, on the Art of Carving, written a hundred years later; and, from the nature of the subject, it is more interesting.[120]