The happiest success of the Archpriest of Hita is to be found in the many tales and apologues which he has scattered on all sides to illustrate the adventures that constitute a framework for his poetry, like that of the “Conde Lucanor” or the “Canterbury Tales.” Most of them are familiar to us, being taken from the old store-houses of Æsop and Phædrus, or rather from the versions of these fabulists common in the earliest Northern French poetry.[138] Among the more fortunate of his very free imitations is the fable of the Frogs who asked for a King from Jupiter, that of the Dog who lost by his Greediness the Meat he carried in his Mouth, and that of the Hares who took Courage when they saw the Frogs were more timid than themselves.[139] A few of them have a truth, a simplicity, and even a grace, which have rarely been surpassed in the same form of composition; as, for instance, that of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse, which, if we follow it from Æsop through Horace to La Fontaine, we shall nowhere find better told than it is by the Archpriest.[140]
What strikes us most, however, and remains with us longest after reading his poetry, is the natural and spirited tone that prevails over every other. In this he is like Chaucer, who wrote a little later in the same century. Indeed, the resemblance between the two poets is remarkable in some other particulars. Both often sought their materials in the Northern French poetry; both have that mixture of devotion and a licentious immorality, much of which belonged to their age, but some of it to their personal character; and both show a wide knowledge of human nature, and a great happiness in sketching the details of individual manners. The original temper of each made him satirical and humorous; and each, in his own country, became the founder of some of the forms of its popular poetry, introducing new metres and combinations, and carrying them out in a versification which, though generally rude and irregular, is often flowing and nervous, and always natural. The Archpriest has not, indeed, the tenderness, the elevation, or the general power of Chaucer; but his genius has a compass, and his verse a skill and success, that show him to be more nearly akin to the great English master than will be believed, except by those who have carefully read the works of both.
The Archpriest of Hita lived in the last years of Alfonso the Eleventh, and perhaps somewhat later. At the very beginning of the next reign, or in 1350, we find a curious poem addressed by a Jew of Carrion to Peter the Cruel, on his accession to the throne. In the manuscript found in the National Library at Madrid, it is called the “Book of the Rabi de Santob,” or “Rabbi Don Santob,” and consists of four hundred and seventy-six stanzas.[141] The measure is the old redondilla, uncommonly easy and flowing for the age; and the purpose of the poem is to give wise moral counsels to the new king, which the poet more than once begs him not to undervalue because they come from a Jew.
Because upon a thorn it grows,
The rose is not less fair;
And wine that from the vine-stock flows
Still flows untainted there.
The goshawk, too, will proudly soar,
Although his nest sits low;
And gentle teachings have their power,