[PEDRO MALÓN DE CHAIDE]. An Augustinian mystic with ascetic tendencies. The present verses are taken from his metrical paraphrase of the Song of Solomon. Cf. Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 27.
[Page 107].—l. 20. escuro, i.e., oscuro.
[JUAN DE TIMONEDA]. A Valencian bookseller and one of the earliest playwrights of the sixteenth century, successful especially in his pasos. He attempted the tale in his Patrañuelo, a collection of some twenty stories, and in the Rosa de romances (1573) published a collection of the ballads of other poets, along with lyrics of his own composition. Cf. Ticknor, III, 81 ff.
[Page 108].—l. 22. vella, i.e., verla.
[FRANCISCO DE FIGUEROA]. A native of Alcalá de Henares who went to Italy as a soldier and there spent a good part of his life, writing verse in both Spanish and Italian. He was successful in the pastoral, and firmly established blank verse (the verso suelto) in Castilian. His eclogue Thyrsis was the first composition in Spanish wholly in that metrical form. Only a part of his poems are preserved, as at his death he seems to have ordered them to be destroyed. Cf. the Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 42; the Colección Fernández, vol. 20; Ticknor, III, 5 ff.
[LUIS BARAHONA DE SOTO]. Enjoyed much fame with his contemporaries for his Lágrimas de Angelica, a continuation of the story in the Italian epic Orlando Furioso. Some pleasing lyrics of his are found in the Flores de poetas ilustres of Espinosa (Valladolid, 1604); cf. also vol. II of the Líricos del siglo XVI in the Biblioteca de autores españoles.
[SONETO: Á CRISTO CRUCIFICADO]. This beautiful sonnet has been ascribed without warrant to St. Theresa, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Francis Xavier and others. It remains anonymous; cf. Foulché-Delbose in the Revue hispanique, II, 120 ff. There is an English poetical version of it, attributed to Dryden (“O God, thou art the object of my love,” etc.); cf. also J. Y. Gibson’s version (The Cid Ballads, etc., London, 1887, II, 144) and the Latin hymn, “Deus ego te amo.” It is printed with the works of St. Theresa in the Biblioteca de autores españoles.
[BENITO ARIAS MONTANO]. A theologian of note and the friend of Luis de León. Cf. vol. II, p. 502 of the Líricos del siglo XVI in the Biblioteca de autores españoles.
[ROMANCES]. In romances or ballads, Spain is the richest of all lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries particularly, there appeared many collections (romanceros) of these short lyrico-narrative poems, dealing with subjects drawn from the history—more or less legendary—of Spain and of France, and with subjects purely chivalrous and erotic in nature. The oldest and most typical of the Spanish ballads have been edited by Wolf and Hoffman in their Primavera y flor de romances, Berlin, 1856 (reprinted by Menéndez y Pelayo in his Antología, vols. 8 and 9), and practically the whole of them are to be found in A. Durán’s Romancero General, Madrid, 1849, 1851 (vols. 10 and 16 of the Biblioteca de autores españoles). The great majority of the romances are in octosyllabic lines bearing the stress on the seventh syllable and having assonance—that is, vowel rhyme only, as distinguished from vowel and consonant rhyme—in the alternate lines. At one time it was believed that the romances were of very ancient origin, although written down only at the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a matter of fact, most of them are rather artificial in nature, and in composition belong to the period when they were written. Gaston Paris maintains, however, that a number of them deal with detached episodes from old epic poems, and there seems to be ample evidence to prove his assertion. Cf. G. Paris in the Journal des savants, mai et juin, 1898 (a review of Menéndez-Pidal’s Leyenda de los Infantes de Lara); Milá y Fontanals De la poesía heroico-popular castellana (in his Obras completas, vol. 7, Barcelona, 1896); Ticknor, I, 95 ff.; F. Wolf, Ueber die Romanzen-poesie der Spanier (in his Studien, etc., Berlin, 1859, pp. 304 ff.); R. Menéndez-Pidal, La leyenda de los Infantes de Lara, Madrid, 1896; Baist in Gröber’s Grundriss, II, 2, pp. 430 ff. Many of the ballads have been translated into English by J. G. Lockhart and others.
[Page 112].—l. 11. For the subject, cf. the [note to p. 100, l. 26]. See the English poetical version of J. G. Lockhart in his Ancient Spanish Ballads, New York, 1856, pp. 4 f.