A very important publication of Spanish ballads in later times comes, however, as it should come, from Spain itself, and was made by Don Agustin Duran, to whom early Spanish literature, in other respects, owes much. He began, in 1828, with the Moorish ballads in the Romancero General of 1614, and went on, in 1829, with two volumes of miscellaneous ballads, ending his labors, in 1832, with two volumes more, containing historical ballads and ballads of chivalry;—in all, five volumes,—the last four of which are collected from all the sources he could command earlier than the middle of the seventeenth century, and the whole of which, with additions, have been republished at Paris by Ochoa, in 1838, and at Barcelona by Pons, in 1840.
Still, a general, thorough, and critical collection of Spanish ballads is wanting;—one embracing those of the known authors, like Cueva, Padilla, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and Góngora, as well as the untold wealth that remains, and must always remain, anonymous in the elder Romanceros. When we possess such a work, and not before, we can understand and honor, as they deserve to be understood and honored, the poetry and the nationality of the old Spanish ballads, upon which, as upon its true foundations, rests the old Spanish drama. But to whom shall we look for it? Is it to Duran at Madrid, or to Wolf at Vienna, or to Huber at Berlin? I have intimations that one may be expected from Duran, and hope they may soon be fulfilled.
APPENDIX, C.
ON FERNAN GOMEZ DE CIBDAREAL AND THE “CENTON EPISTOLARIO.”
(See Vol. I. p. 398.)
I have treated the “Centon Epistolario” in the text just as it has heretofore been treated; that is, as a collection of the unstudied letters of a simple-hearted, vain man, who, for above forty years, was attached to the person of John the Second, and familiar with what was done at his court. Still, the exactness and genuineness of the work have not been entirely unquestioned. Mayans y Siscar (in his Orígenes, Tom. I., 1737, p. 203) speaks of Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga, (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 500, Vol. III. [p. 184],) the well-known author and diplomatist of the time of Philip the Fourth, sometimes called Vera y Figueroa, and says, “Feamente adulteró las epístolas históricas del Bachiller Fernan Gomez de Ciudad Real,”—He shamefully adulterated the historical letters of the Bachelor Ferdinand Gomez de Cibdareal; but Mayans gives no reasons or facts to support this severe charge, and he is roundly rebuked for it by Diosdado, (in his treatise “De Primâ Typographiæ Hispanicæ Ætate,” Romæ, 1794, p. 74,) who calls it “an atrocious calumny.” And again, Quintana, in his Life of Alvaro de Luna, (Vidas de Españoles Célebres, Tom. III., 1833, p. 248, note,) is so much troubled about some of the discrepancies between the Bachelor’s accounts of the death of the Constable and the known facts of history, that he, too, suggests all sorts of doubts, but ends by saying that he follows the Bachelor’s accounts as a sufficient authority where they are not directly contradicted by others higher and safer.
My own opinion is, that the book is a forgery from beginning to end; but a forgery so ingenious, so happy, so agreeable, that it may seem an ungracious thing to tell the truth about it, or attempt to disturb the position it has so long held in the Castilian literature of the fifteenth century. The facts on which I ground my opinion are chiefly these:—
1. No such person as the Bachelor Cibdareal is mentioned in the chronicles or correspondence of the period during which he is supposed to have lived, though our accounts from such sources are copious and minute; noticing, I believe, everybody of consequence at the court of John the Second, and certainly many persons of much less importance than the king’s confidential physician.