[5] Nic. Antonio enumerates the editions of thirteen of this doughty family of knights-errant. (Bibliotheca Nova, tom. ii. pp. 394, 395.) He dismisses his notice with the reflection, somewhat more charitable than that of Don Quixote's curate, that "he had felt little interest in investigating these fables, yet was willing to admit, with others, that their reading was not wholly useless."
Moratin has collected an appalling catalogue of part of the books of chivalry published in Spain at the close of the fifteenth and the following century. The first on the list is the Carcel de Amor, por Diego Hernandez de San Pedro, en Burgos, año de 1496. Obras, tom. i. pp. 93-98.
[6] Cervantes, Don Quixote, tom. i. part. 1, cap. 6.
The curate's wrath is very emphatically expressed. "Pues vayan todos al corral, dixo el Cura, que a trueco de quemar a la reyna Pintiquïniestra, y al pastor Darinel y a sus eglogas, y a las endiabladas y revueltas razones de su autor, quemara con ellos al padre que me engendro si andubiera en figura de caballero andante." The author of the "Dialogo de las Lenguas" chimes in with the same tone of criticism. "Los quales," he says, speaking of books of chivalry, "de mas de ser mentirossissimos, son tal mal compuestos, assi por dezir las mentiras tan desvergonçadas, como por tener el estilo desbaraçado, que no ay buen estomago que lo pueda leer." Apud Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, tom. ii. p. 158.
[7] The labors of Bowles, Rios, Arrieta, Pellicer, and Navarrete would seem to have left little to desire in regard to the illustration of Cervantes. But the commentaries of Clemencin, published since this chapter was written, in 1833, show how much yet remained to be supplied. They afford the most copious illustrations, both literary and historical, of his author, and exhibit that nice taste in verbal criticism, which is not always joined with such extensive erudition. Unfortunately, the premature death of Clemencin has left the work unfinished; but the fragment completed, which reaches to the close of the First Part, is of sufficient value permanently to associate the name of its author with that of the greatest genius of his country.
[8] The fabliaux cannot fairly be considered as an exception to this. These graceful little performances, the work of professed bards, who had nothing further in view than the amusement of a listless audience, have little claim to be considered as the expression of national feeling or sentiment. The poetry of the south of France, more impassioned and lyrical in its character, wears the stamp, not merely of patrician elegance, but refined artifice, which must not be confounded with the natural flow of popular minstrelsy.
[9] How far the achievements claimed for the Campeador are strictly true, is little to the purpose. It is enough that they were received as true, throughout the Peninsula, as far back as the twelfth, or, at latest, the thirteenth century.
[10] One exception, among others, readily occurs in the pathetic old ballad of the Conde Alarcos, whose woful catastrophe, with the unresisting suffering of the countess, suggests many points of coincidence with the English minstrelsy. The English reader will find a version of it in the "Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain," from the pen of Mr. Bowring, to whom the literary world is so largely indebted for an acquaintance with the popular minstrelsy of Europe.
[11] I have already noticed the insufficiency of the romances to authentic history, Part I. Chap. 8, Note 30. My conclusions there have been confirmed by Mr. Irving, (whose researches have led him in a similar direction,) in his "Alhambra," published nearly a year after the above note was written.
The great source of the popular misconceptions respecting the domestic history of Granada is Gines Perez de Hyta, whose work, under the title of "Historia de los Vandos de los Zegries y Abencerrages, Cavalleros Moros de Granada, y las Guerras Civiles que huvo en ella," was published at Alcalá in 1604. This romance, written in prose, embodied many of the old Moorish ballads in it, whose singular beauty, combined with the romantic and picturesque character of the work itself, soon made it extremely popular, until at length it seems to have acquired a degree of the historical credit claimed for it by its author as a translation from an Arabian chronicle; a credit which has stood it in good stead with the tribe of travel-mongers and raconteurs, persons always of easy faith, who have propagated its fables far and wide. Their credulity, however, may be pardoned in what has imposed on the perspicacity of so cautions an historian as Müller. Allgemeine Geschichte, (1817,) band ii. p. 504.