And the Moor, who is my husband,
Loves me better than his life!’
Gibson has missed an opportunity in not translating one [110] of the popular ballads on the precocious Master of the Order of Calatrava, Rodrigo Girón, who was killed at the siege of Loja in 1482:—
¡Ay, Dios qué buen caballero el Maestre de Calatrava![71]
But he makes amends with a version of a sixteenth-century romance[72] which he entitles The Lady and the Lions: the story has been versified by Schiller, and has been still more admirably retold by Browning in The Glove. And we have also from Gibson a version of a rather puzzling romance given by Pérez de Hita:—
Cercada está Santa Fe, con mucho lienzo encerado.[73]
The fact that full rhymes take the place of assonants is a decisive argument against the antiquity, and also against the popular origin, of this ballad in which, as Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo points out, a rather insignificant Garcilaso de la Vega of the end of the fifteenth century is confused with a namesake and relative who fell at Baza in 1455, and is further represented as the hero of a feat of arms—the slaying of a Moor who insultingly attached the device Ave Maria to his horse’s tail—which was really performed by an ancestor of his about a hundred and fifty years earlier. This later Garcilaso was a favourite of fortune, for, at the end of the sixteenth century, Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega wrote a romance ascribing to him Hernando del Pulgar’s daring exploit—his riding into Granada, fastening with his dagger a placard inscribed Ave Maria to the door of the chief mosque, and thus proclaiming his intention of converting it into a Christian church.
It is needless to discuss Lockhart’s group of so-called ‘Moorish ballads.’[74] If any one wishes to translate a romance of this kind, let him try to convey to us the adroitly suggested orientalism of
Yo me era mora Moraima, morilla de un bel catar:
cristiano vino á mi puerta, cuitada, per me engañar.[75]