His soul to Him, Who gave it, rose;

God lead it to its long repose,

Its glories rest!

And though the warrior’s sun has set,

Its light shall linger round us yet,

Bright, radiant, blest.

These are a few of the forty-two stanzas, in which with almost flawless simplicity of style Manrique mourns in his own personal loss the sorrow and regret of all the human race. He begins with the vanity of life; he ends with a plea for resignation; not an Omar Khayyam’s bitter surrender to inevitable destiny but a confident trust in a God who is both Creator and Saviour.

Other verses of Manrique are to be found in the various cancioneros, or collections of Castilian poetry and song, that were gathered together in the course of the fifteenth century; but none deserve nor have reaped the same applause. In 1511, a Cancionero General was printed at Valencia, that may be taken as typical of Queen Isabel’s reign and those of her father and brother. It declared its contents as “many and divers works of all, or of the most notable troubadours of Spain”; and it is indeed a varied collection of devotional hymns, moral discussions, love-songs, ballads, riddles, villancicos or poems supposed to be of rustic origin, and invenciones or rhymes concocted by the chivalry of Castile to explain the devices on their shields.

In all there are over eleven hundred pieces; but few, especially of those that represent the close of the century, have the note of distinction. The true spirit of song is sometimes there, rising with sudden power and conviction in scattered lines or stanzas; but for the most part imprisoned in a maze of forms and unrealities that leave our emotions and our imaginations cold. The butterfly is still enwrapped in the chrysalis.

Spanish prose, during the reign of the Catholic Sovereigns, was in the same transitional stage as poetry. The promise of good things was working to its fulfilment, but the harvest would be reaped in another age. In the national chronicles, the oldest form of prose literature, this change may be seen at work. The narratives of the reign of Henry IV., covering the earlier years of Isabel’s life, are mere annals, sometimes more or less impartial as in the case of “Enriquez del Castillo,” or else frankly partisan, like the pages that bear the name of Alonso de Palencia.[[12]] Their value lies either in their picturesque style, or in the descriptions of scenes, at which the authors themselves were present.