able proof of the near affinity that exists between prose and poetry in Spain; a fact which goes far to explain the facility and astonishing fecundity of some of its popular poets. For the Spaniards, it was nearly as easy to extemporize in verse as in prose. The example of Alfonso the Tenth was followed by his son, who appointed a chronicler to take charge of the events of his reign. This practice continued with later sovereigns, until the chronicle gradually rose to the pretensions of regular history; when historiographers, with fixed salaries, were appointed by the crowns of Castile and Aragon; giving rise to a more complete body of contemporary annals, from authentic public sources, than is to be found in any other country in Christendom. Such a collection, beginning with the thirteenth century, is of high value, and would be of far higher, were its writers gifted with any thing like a sound spirit of criticism. But superstition lay too closely at the bottom of the Castilian character to allow of this; a superstition nourished by the strange circumstances of the nation, by the legends of the saints, by the miracles coined by the clergy in support of the good cause, by the very ballads of which we have been treating, which, mingling fact with fable, threw a halo around both that made it difficult to distinguish the one from the other. So palpable to a modern age are many of these fictions in regard to the Cid, that one ingenious critic doubt even the real existence of this personage. But this is a degree of scepticism, which, as Mr. Ticknor finely remarks, "makes too great a demand on our credulity." This superstition, too deeply seated to be eradicated, and so repugnant to a philosophical spirit of criticism, is the greatest blemish on the writings of the Castilian historians, even of the ripest age of scholarship, who show an appetite for the marvellous and an easy faith scarcely to be credited at the present day. But this is hardly a blemish with the older chronicles, and was suited to the twilight condition of the times. They are, indeed, a most interesting body of ancient literature, with all the freshness and chivalrous bearing of the age; with their long, rambling episodes, that lead to nothing; their childish fondness for pageants and knightly spectacles; their rough dialect, which, with the progress of time, working off the impurities of an unformed vocabulary, rose, in the reign of John the Second and of Ferdinand and Isabella, into passages of positive eloquence. But we cannot do better than give the concluding remarks of our author on this rich mine of literature, which he has now, for the first time, fully explored and turned up to the public gaze. "As we close it up," he says, speaking of an old chronicle he has been criticizing,-" we should not forget, that the whole series, extending over full two hundred and fifty years, from the time of Alfonso the Wise to the accession of Charles the Fifth, and covering the New World as well as the Old, is unrivalled in richness, in variety, and in picturesque and poetical elements. In truth, the chronicles of no other nation can, on such points, be compared to them; not even the Portuguese, which approach the nearest in original and early materials; nor the French, which, in Joinville and Froissart, make the highest claims in another direction. For these old Spanish chronicles, whether they have their foundations in truth or in fable, always strike farther down than those of any other nation into the deep soil of the popular feeling and character. The old Spanish loyalty, the old Spanish religious faith, as both were formed and nourished in the long periods of national trial and suffering, are constantly coming out; hardly less in Columbus and his followers, or even amidst the atrocities of the conquests in the New World, than in the half-miraculous accounts of the battles of Hazinas and Tolosa, or in the grand and glorious drama of the fall of Granada. Indeed, wherever we go under their leading, whether to the court of Tamerlane, or to that of Saint Ferdinand, we find the heroic elements of the national genius gathered around us; and thus, in this vast, rich mass of chronicles, containing such a body of antiquities, traditions, and fables as has been offered to no other people, we are constantly discovering, not only the materials from which were drawn a multitude of the old Spanish ballads, plays, and romances, but a mine which has been unceasingly wrought by the rest of Europe for similar purposes, and still remains unexhausted." We now come to the Romances of Chivalry, to which the transition is not difficult from the romantic chronicles we have been considering. It was, perhaps, the romantic character of these compositions, as well as of the popular minstrelsy of the country, which supplied the wants of the Spaniards in this way, and so long delayed the appearance of the true Romance of Chivalry. Long before it was seen in Spain, this kind of writing had made its appearance, in prose and verse, in other lands; and the tales of Arthur and the Round Table, and of Charlemagne and his Peers, had beguiled the long evenings of our Norman ancestors, and of their brethren on the other side of the Channel. The first book of chivalry that was published in Spain even then was not indigenous, but translated from a Portuguese work, the Amadis de Gaula. But the Portuguese, according to the account of Mr. Ticknor, probably perished with the library of a nobleman, in the great earthquake at Lisbon, in 1755; so that Montalvan's Castilian translation, published in Queen Isabella's reign, now takes the place of the original. Of its merits as a translation who can speak? Its merits as a work of imagination, and, considering the age, its literary execution, are of a high order. An English version of the book appeared early in the present century, from the pen of Southey, to whom English literature is indebted for more than one valuable contribution of a similar kind. We well remember the delight with which, in our early days, we pored over its fascinating pages, - the bright scenes in which we revelled of Oriental mythology, the beautiful portraiture which is held up of knightly courtesy in the person of Amadis, and the feminine loveliness of Oriana. It was an ideal world of beauty and magnificence, to which the Southern imagination had given a far warmer coloring than was to be found in the ruder conceptions of the Northern minstrel. At a later period, we have read — tried to read the same story in the pages of Montalvan himself. But the age of chivalry was gone. The "Amadis " touched the right spring in the Castilian bosom, and its popularity was great and immediate. Edition succeeded edition; and, what was worse, a swarm of other knight-errants soon came into the world, claiming kindred with the Amadis. But few of them bore any resemblance to their prototype, other than in their extravagance. Their merits were summarily settled by the worthy curate in "Don Quixote," who ordered most of them to the flames, declaring that the good qualities of Amadis should not cloak the sins of his posterity. The tendency of these books was very mischievous. They fostered the spirit of exaggeration, both in language and sentiment, too natural to the Castilian. They debauched the taste of the reader, while the voluptuous images, in which most of them indulged, did no good to his morals. They encouraged, in fine, a wild spirit of knight-errantry, which seemed to emulate the extravagance of the tales themselves. Sober men wrote, preachers declaimed against them, but in vain. The Cortes of 1553 presented a petition to the crown, that the publication of such works might be prohibited, as pernicious to society. Another petition of the same body, in 1555, insists on this still more strongly, and in terms that, coming, as they do, from so grave an assembly, can hardly be read at the present day without a smile. Mr. Ticknor notices both these legislative acts, in an extract which we shall give. But he omits the words of the petition of 1555, which dwells so piteously on the grievances of the nation; and which we will quote, as they may amuse the reader. 66 Moreover," the instrument, says that it is very we say notorious what mischief has been done to young men and maidens, and other persons, by the perusal of books full of lies and vanities, like Amadis, and works of that description, since young people especially, from their natural idleness, resort to this kind of reading, and becoming enamoured of passages of love or arms, or other nonsense which they find set forth therein, when situations at all analogous offer, are led to act much more extravagantly than they otherwise would have done. And many times the daughter, when her mother has locked her up safely at home, amuses herself with reading these books, which do her more hurt than she would have received from going abroad. All which redounds, not only to the dishonor of individuals, but to the great detriment of conscience, by diverting the affections from holy, true, and Christian doctrine, to those wicked vanities, with which the wits, as we have intimated, are completely bewildered. To remedy this, we entreat your Majesty, that no book treating of such matters be henceforth permitted to be read, that those now printed be collected and burned, and that none be published hereafter without special license; by which measures your Majesty will render great service to God, as well as to these kingdoms," &c. &c. But what neither the menaces of the pulpit nor the authority of the law could effect, was brought about by the breath of ridicule, "That soft and summer breath, whose subtile power The fever was at its height when Cervantes sent his knighterrant into the world, to combat the phantoms of chivalry; and at one touch of his lance, they disappeared forever. From the day of the publication of the "Don Quixote not a book of chivalry was ever written in Spain. There is no other such triumph recorded in the annals of genius. We close these remarks with the following extract, which shows the condition of society in Castile under the influence of these romances. "Spain, when the romances of chivalry first appeared, had long been peculiarly the land of knighthood. The Moorish wars, which had made every gentleman a soldier, necessarily tended to this result; and so did the free spirit of the communities, led on as they were, during the next period, by barons, who long continued almost as independent in their castles as the king was on his throne. Such a state of things, in fact, is to be recognized as far back as the thirteenth century, when the Partidas, by the most minute and pains-taking legislation, provided for a condition of society not easily to be distinguished from that set forth in the Amadis or the Palmerin. The poem and history of the Cid bear witness yet earlier, indirectly indeed, but very strongly, to a similar state of the country; and so do many of the old ballads and other records of the national feelings and traditions that had come from the fourteenth century. "But in the fifteenth, the chronicles are full of it, and exhibit it in forms the most grave and imposing. Dangerous tournaments, in some of which the chief men of the time, and even the kings themselves, took part, occur constantly, and are recorded among the important events of the age. At the passage of arms near Orbigo, in the reign of John the Second, eighty knights, as we have seen, were found ready to risk their lives for as fantastic a fiction of gallantry as is recorded in any of the romances of chivalry; a folly of which this was by no means the only instance. Nor did they confine their extravagances to their own country. In the same reign, two Spanish knights went as far as Burgundy, professedly in search of adventures, which they strangely mingled with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; seeming to regard both as religious exercises. And as late as the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, Fernando del Pulgar, their wise secretary, gives us the names of several distinguished noblemen, personally known to himself, who had gone into foreign countries, in order,' as he says, to try the fortune of arms with any cavalier that might |