[489] Epist. cii., jejunum atque inops videri cœpit, posteoquam Græcos colui auctores.
Romantic ballads of Spain. 130. The Castilian poets of the fifteenth century have been collectively mentioned on a former occasion. Bouterwek refers to the latter part of this age most of the romances, which turn upon Saracen story, and the adventures of “knights of Granada, gentlemen, though Moors.” Sismondi follows him without, perhaps, much reflection, and endeavours to explain what he might have doubted. Fear having long ceased in the bosoms of the Castilian Christians, even before conquest had set its seal to their security, hate, the child of fear, had grown feebler; and the romancers felt themselves at liberty to expatiate in the rich field of Mohammedan customs and manners. These had already exercised a considerable influence over Spain. But this opinion seems hard to be supported; nor do I find that the Spanish critics claim so much antiquity for the Moorish class of romantic ballads. Most of them, it is acknowledged, belong to the sixteenth, and some to the seventeenth century; and the internal evidence is against their having been written before the Moorish wars had become matter of distant tradition. We shall therefore take no notice of the Spanish romance-ballads till we come to the age of Philip II., to which they principally belong.[490]
[490] Bouterwek, p. 121. Sismondi, iii. 222. Romances Moriscos, Madr. 1828.
Pastoral romances. 131. Bouterwek places in this decade the first specimens of the pastoral romance which the Castilian language affords.[491] But the style is borrowed from a neighbouring part of the peninsula, where this species of fiction seems to have been indigenous. The Portuguese nation cultivated poetry as early as the Castilian; and we have seen that some remains of a date anterior to the fourteenth century. But to the heroic romance they seem to have paid no regard; we do not find that it ever existed among them. Love chiefly occupied the Lusitanian muse; and to trace that passion through all its labyrinths, to display its troubles in a strain of languid melancholy, was the great aim of every poet. This led to the invention of pastoral romances, founded on the ancient traditions as to the felicity of shepherds and their proneness to love, and rendered sometimes more interesting for the time by the introduction of real characters and events under a slight disguise.[492] This artificial and effeminate sort of composition, which, if it may now and then be not unpleasing, cannot fail to weary the modern reader by its monotony, is due to Portugal, and having been adopted in languages better known, became for a long time highly popular in Europe.
[491] P. 123.
[492] Bouterwek’s Hist. of Portuguese Literature, p. 43.
Portuguese lyric poetry. 132. The lyrical poems of Portugal were collected by Garcia de Resende, in the Cancioneiro Geral, published in 1516. Some few of these are of the fourteenth century, for we find the name of King Pedro, who died in 1369. Others are by the Infante Don Pedro, son of John I., in the earlier part of the fifteenth. But a greater number belong nearly to the present or preceding decade, or even to the ensuing age, commemorating the victories of the Portuguese in Asia. This collection is of extreme scarcity; none of the historians of Portuguese literature have seen it. Bouterwek and Sismondi declare that they have caused search to be made in various libraries of Europe without success. There is, however, a copy in the British Museum; and M. Raynouard has given a short account of one that he had seen in the Journal des Savans for 1826. In this article he observes, that the Cancioneiro is a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish pieces. I believe, however, that very little Spanish will be found, with the exception of the poems of the Infante Pedro, which occupy some leaves. The whole number of poets is but one hundred and thirty-two, even if some names do not occur twice; which I mention, because it has been erroneously said to exceed considerably that of the Spanish Cancioneiro. The volume is in folio, and contains two hundred and twenty-seven leaves. The metres are those usual in Spanish; some versos de arte mayor; but the greater part in trochaic redondillas. I observed no instance of the assonant rhyme; but there are several glosses, or, in the Portuguese word, grosas.[493] The chief part is amatory; but there are lines on the death of kings, and other political events.[494]
[493] Bouterwek, p. 30, has observed, that the Portuguese employ the glosa, calling it volta. The word in the Cancioneiro is grosa.
[494] A manuscript collection of Portuguese lyric poetry of the fifteenth century belonged to Mr. Heber, and was sold to Messrs. Payne and Foss. It would probably be found on comparison to contain many of the pieces in the Cancioneiro Geral, but it is not a copy of it.
German popular books. 133. The Germans, if they did not as yet excel in the higher department of typography, were by no means negligent of their own great invention. The books, if we include the smallest, printed in the empire between 1470 and the close of the century, amount to several thousand editions. A large proportion of these were in their own language. They had a literary public, as we may call it, not merely in their courts and universities, but in their respectable middle class, the burghers of the free cities, and, perhaps, in the artizans whom they employed. Their reading was almost always with a serious end; but no people so successfully cultivated the art of moral and satirical fable. These, in many instances, spread with great favour through cisalpine Europe. Among the works of this kind, in the fifteenth century, two deserve mention; the Eulenspiegel, a book which became popular afterwards in England by the name of Howleglass, and a superior and better known production, the Narrenschiff, or Ship of Fools, by Sebastian Brandt of Strasburg, the first edition of which I do not find referred to any date; but the Latin translation appeared at Lyons in 1488. It was translated into English by Barclay, and published early in 1509. It is a metrical satire on the follies of every class, and may possibly have suggested to Erasmus his Encomium Moriæ. But the idea was not absolutely new; the theatrical company established at Paris, under the name of Enfans de San Souci, as well as the ancient office of jester or fool in our courts and castles, implied the same principle of satirising mankind with ridicule so general, that every man should feel more pleasure from the humiliation of his neighbours, than pain from his own. Brandt does not show much poetical talent; but his morality is clear and sound; he keeps the pure and right-minded reader on his side; and in an age when little better came into competition, his characters of men, though more didactic than descriptive, did not fail to please. The influence such books of simple fiction and plain moral would possess over a people, may be judged by the delight they once gave to children, before we had learned to vitiate the healthy appetite of ignorance by premature refinements and stimulating variety.[495]