Last night fair castles held my train—to-night where shall I lie?
Last night a hundred pages did serve me on the knee—
To-night not one I call my own: not one pertains to me."
The original is founded on Pedro de Corral's Crónica de Don Rodrigo (chapters 207, 208), which was not written till 1404, and from the same source (chapters 238-244) comes the substance of Lockhart's second ballad:—
"It was when the King Rodrigo had lost his realm of Spain."
The modernity of almost every piece in Lockhart's collection were as easily proved; but it is more important at this point to turn from the popular song-makers to the new school of writers which was forming itself upon foreign models.
Representative of these innovations is the grandson of Enrique II., Enrique de Villena (1384-1434), upon whom posterity has conferred a marquisate which he never possessed in life.[5] His first production is said to have been a set of coplas written, as Master of the Order of Calatrava, for the royal feasts at Zaragoza in 1414; his earliest known work is his Arte de trovar (Art of Poetry), given in the same year at the Consistory of the Gay Science at Barcelona. Villena, of whose treatise mere scraps survive, shows minute acquaintance with the works of early trovadores; of general principles he says naught, losing himself in discursive details. Early in 1417 followed the Trabajos de Hércules (Labours of Hercules), first written in Catalan by request of Pero Pardo, and done into Castilian in the autumn of the year. This tedious allegory, crushed beneath a weight of pedantry, is unredeemed by ingenuity or fancy, and the style is disfigured by violent and absurd inversions which bespeak long, tactless study of Latin texts. Juan Manuel's dignified restraint is lost on his successor, itching to flaunt inopportune learning with references to Aristotle, Aulus Gellius, and St. Jerome. In 1423, at the instance of Sancho de Jaraba, Villena wrote his twenty chapters on carving—the Arte cisoria, an epicure's handbook to the royal table, compact of curious counsels and recipes expounded with horrid eloquence by a pedant who tended to gluttony. Still odder is the Libro de Aojamiento (Dissertation on the Evil Eye) with its three "preventive modes," as recommended by Avicenna and his brethren. Translations of Dante and Cicero are lost, and three treatises on leprosy, on consolation, and on the Eighth Psalm are valueless. Villena piqued himself on being the first in Spain—he might perhaps have said the first anywhere—to translate the whole Æneid; but he marches to ruin with his mimicry of Latin idioms, his abuse of inversion, and his graces of a cart-horse in the lists. No contemporary was more famed for universal accomplishment; so that, while he lived, men held him for a wizard, and, when he died, applauded the partial burning of his books by Lope de Barrientos, afterwards Bishop of Segovia, who put the rest to his private uses. Santillana and Juan de Mena assert that Villena wrote Castilian verse, and Baena implies as much; if so, he was probably a common poetaster, the loss of whose rhymes is a stroke of luck. A Castilian poem on the labours of Hercules, ascribed to him by Pellicer, is a rank forgery. Measured by his repute, Villena's works are disappointing. But if we reflect that he translated Dante, that he strove to naturalise successful foreign methods, and that in his absurdest moments he proves his susceptibility to new ideas, we may explain his renown and his influence. Nor did these end with his life; for Lope de Vega, Alarcón, Rojas Zorrilla, and Hartzenbusch have brought him on the boards, and he has appealed with singular force to the imaginations of both Quevedo and Larra.
To Villena's time belong two specimens of the old encyclopædic school: the Libro de los Gatos, translated from the Narrationes of the English monk, Odo of Cheriton; and the Libro de los Enxemplos of Clemente Sánchez of Valderas, whose seventy-one missing stories were brought to light in 1878 by M. Morel-Fatio. Sánchez' collection, thus completed, shows the entrance into Spain of the legend of Buddha's life, adapted by some Christian monk from the Sanskrit Lalita-Vistara, and popular the world over as the Romance of Barlaam and Josaphat. The style is carefully modelled on Juan Manuel's manner.
The Cancionero de Baena, named after the anthologist Juan Alfonso de Baena above mentioned, contains the verses of some sixty poets who flourished during the reign of Juan II., or a little earlier. This collection, first published in 1851, mirrors two conflicting tendencies. The old Galician school is represented by Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino (sometimes called de Illescas), a copious, foul-mouthed ruffian, with gusts of inspiration and an abiding mastery of technique. To the same section belong the Archdeacon of Toro, a facile versifier, and Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara, whose name is inseparable from that of Macías, El Enamorado. Macías has left five songs of slight distinction, and, as a poet, ranks below Rodríguez de la Cámara. Yet he lives on the capital of his legend, the type of the lover faithful unto death, and the circumstances of his passing are a part of Castilian literature. The tale is (but there are variants), that Macías, once a member of Villena's household, was imprisoned at Arjonilla, where a jealous husband slew the poet in the act of singing his platonic love. Quoted times innumerable, this more or less authentic story of Macías' end ensured him an immortality far beyond the worth of his verses: it fired the popular imagination, and enters into literature in Lope de Vega's Porfiar hasta morir and in Larra's El Doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente.
A like romantic memory attaches to Macías' friend, Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara (also called Rodríguez del Padrón), the last poet of the Galician school, represented in Baena's Cancionero by a single cántica. The conjectures that make Rodríguez the lover of Juan II.'s wife, Isabel, or of Enrique IV.'s wife, Juana, are destroyed by chronology. None the less it is certain that the writer was concerned in some mysterious, dangerous love-affair which led to his exile, and, as some believe, to his profession as a Franciscan monk. His seventeen surviving songs are all erotic, with the exception of the Flama del divino Rayo, his best performance in thanksgiving for his spiritual conversion. His loves are also recounted in three prose books, of which the semi-chivalresque novel, El Siervo libre de Amor, is still readable. But Rodríguez interests most as the last representative of the Galician verse tradition.