Fuera mejor los de Rodrigo luego:
Gozara España el timbre coronado
De sus castillos en mayor sossiego
Que le dio Leovigildo, y no se viera
Estampa de Africano en su ribera.
L. vi. ff. 131.
A remarkable instance of the inconvenient manner in which the b and the v are indiscriminately used by the Spaniards, occurs here in the original edition. The w not being used in that language, it would naturally be represented by vv; and here, the printer, using most unluckily his typographical licence, has made the word Vbitisa.
“The Spaniards,” says that late worthy Jo. Sandford, some time fellow of Magdalane college, in Oxford, (in his Spanish Grammar, 1632) “do with a kind of wantonness so confound the sound of b with v, that it is hard to determine when and in what words it should retain its own power of a labial letter, which gave just cause of laughter at that Spaniard who, being in conversation with a French lady, and minding to commend her children for fair, said unto her, using the Spanish liberty in pronouncing the French,—Madame, vous avez des veaux enfans, telling her that she had calves to her children, instead of saying, beaux enfans, fair children. Neither can I well justify him who wrote veneficio for beneficio.”
Conimbrica, whose ruined towers