Castilian and French literatures, as well as on some portions of the English, before successive classes, which he continued to repeat, with the occasional variation of oral instruction, during the fifteen years he remained at the University.

We well remember the sensation produced on the first delivery of these lectures, which served to break down the barrier which had so long confined the student to a converse with antiquity; they opened to him a free range among those great masters of modern literature who had hitherto been veiled in the obscurity of a foreign idiom. The influence of this instruction was soon visible in the higher education, as well as the literary ardor shown by the graduates. So decided was the impulse thus given to the popular sentiment, that considerable apprehension was felt lest modern literature was to receive a disproportionate share of attention in the scheme of collegiate education.

After the lapse of fifteen years so usefully employed, Mr. Ticknor resigned his office, and, thus released from his academic labors, paid a second visit to Europe, where, in a second residence of three years, he much enlarged the amount and the value of his literary collection. In the more perfect completion of this he was greatly assisted by the professor of Arabic in the University of Madrid, Don Pascual de Gayangos, a scholar to whose literary sympathy and assistance more than one American writer has been indebted, and who to a profound knowledge of Oriental literature unites one equally extensive in the European.

With these aids, and his own untiring efforts, Mr. Ticknor succeeded in bringing together a body of materials in print and manuscript, for the illustration of the Castilian, such as, probably, has no rival either in public or private collections. This will be the more readily believed, when we find that nearly every author employed in the composition of this great work with the exception of a few for which he has made ample acknowledgments is to be found on his own shelves. We are now to consider in what manner he has availed himself of this inestimable collection of materials.

The title of the book-the "History of Spanish Literature" is intended to comprehend all that relates to the poetry of the country, its romances, and works of imagination of every sort, its criticism and eloquence, in short, what

ever can be brought under the head of elegant literature. Even its chronicles and regular histories are included; for, though scientific in their import, they are still, in respect to their style and their execution as works of art, brought into the department of ornamental writing. In Spain, freedom of thought, or, at least, the free expression of it, has been so closely fettered that science, in its strictest sense, has made little progress in, that unhappy country, and a history of its elegant literature is, more than in any other land, a general history of its intellectual progress.

The work is divided into three great periods, having refe rence to time rather than to any philosophical arrangement. Indeed, Spanish literature affords less facilities for such an arrangement than the literature of many other countries, as that of England and of Italy, for example, where, from different causes, there have been periods exhibiting literary characteristics that stamp them with a peculiar physiognomy. For example, in England we have the age of Elizabeth, the age of Queen Anne, our own age. In Italy, the philosophical arrangement seems to correspond well enough with the chronological. Thus, the Trecentisti, the Seicentisti, convey ideas as distinct and as independent of each other as the different schools of Italian art. But in Spain, literature is too deeply tinctured at its fountain-head not to retain somewhat of the primitive coloring through the whole course of its descent. Patriotism, chivalrous loyalty, religious zeal, under whatever modification, and under whatever change of circumstances, have constituted, as Mr. Ticknor has well insisted, the enduring elements of the national literature. And it is this obvious preponderance of these elements throughout, which makes the distribution into separate masses on any philosophical principle extremely difficult. A proof of this is afforded by the arrangement now adopted by Mr. Ticknor himself, in the limit assigned to his first period, which is considerably shorter than that assigned to it in his original Lectures. The alteration, as we shall take occasion to notice hereafter, is, in our judgment, a decided improvement. The first great division embraces the whole time from the earliest appearance of a written document in the Castilian to the commencement of the sixteenth century, the reign of Charles the Fifth,—a period of nearly four centuries.

At the very outset, we are met by the remarkable Poem of the Cid, that primitive epic, which, like the Nieblungenlied or the Iliad, stands as the traditional legend of an heroic age, exhibiting all the freshness and glow which belong to the morning of a nation's existence. The name of the author, as is often the case with those memorials of the olden time, when the writer thought less of himself than of his work, has not come down to us. Even the date of its composition is uncertain, probably before the year 1200; a century earlier than the poem of Dante; a century and a half before Petrarch and Chaucer. The subject of it, as its name imports, is, the achievements of the renowned Ruy Diaz de Bivar-the Cid, the Campeador, "the lord, the champion," as he was fondly styled by his countrymen, as well as by his Moorish foes, in commemoration of his prowess, chiefly displayed against the infidel. The versification is the fourteensyllable measure, artless, and exhibiting all the characteristics of an unformed idiom, but, with its rough melody, well suited to the expression of the warlike and stirring incidents in which it abounds. It is impossible to peruse it without finding ourselves carried back to the heroic age of Castile; and we feel that, in its simple and cordial portraiture of existing manners, we get a more vivid impression of the feudal period than is to be gathered from the more formal pages of the chronicler. Heeren has pronounced that the poems of Homer were one of the principal bonds which held the Grecian states together. The assertion may seem extravagant; but we can well understand that a poem like that of the Cid, with all its defects as a work of art, by its proud historic recollections of an heroic age, should do much to nourish the principle of patriotism in the bosoms of the people.

From the "Cid" Mr. Ticknor passes to the review of several other poems of the thirteenth, and some of the fourteenth century. They are usually of considerable length. The Castilian muse, at the outset, seems to have delighted in works of longue haleine. Some of them are of a satirical character, directing their shafts against the clergy, with an independence which seems to have marked also the contemporaneous productions of other nations, but which, in Spain at least, was rarely found at a later period. Others of these venerable productions are tinged with the religious bigotry

which enters so largely into the best portions of the Castilian literature.

One of the most remarkable poems of the period is the Danza General, the "Dance of Death." The subject is not original with the Spaniards, and has been treated by the bards of other nations in the elder time. It represents the ghastly revels of the dread monarch, to which all are summoned, of every degree, from the potentate to the peasant.

"It is founded on the well-known fiction, so often illustrated both in painting and in verse during the Middle Ages, that all men, of all conditions, are summoned to the Dance of Death; a kind of spiritual masquerade, in which the different ranks of society, from the Pope to the young child, appear dancing with the skeleton form of Death. In this Spanish version it is striking and picturesque, more so, perhaps, than in any other, the ghastly nature of the subject being brought into a very lively contrast with the festive tone of the verses, which frequently recalls some of the better parts of those flowing stories that now and then occur in the " Mirror for Magistrates.'

"The first seven stanzas of the Spanish poem constitute a prologue, in which Death issues his summons partly in his own person, and partly in that of a preaching friar, ending thus:

Come to the Dance of Death, all ye whose fate

By birth is mortal, be ye great or small;

And willing come, nor loitering, nor late,

Else force shall bring you struggling to my thrall:
For since yon friar hath uttered loud his call

To penitence and godliness sincere,
He that delays must hope no waiting here;

For still the cry is, Haste! and, Haste to all!

"Death now proceeds, as in the old pictures and poems, to summon, first, the Pope, then cardinals, kings, bishops, and so on, down to day-laborers; all of whom are forced to join his mortal dance, though each first makes some remonstrance, that indicates surprise, horror, or reluctance. The call to youth and beauty is spirited:

Bring to my dance, and bring without delay,

Those damsels twain, you see so bright and fair;
They came, but came not in a willing way,
To list my chants of mortal grief and care:
Nor shall the flowers and roses fresh they wear,

Nor rich attire, avail their forms to save.
They strive in vain who strive against the grave;
It may not be; my wedded brides they are."

Another poem, of still higher pretensions, but, like the last, still in manuscript, is the Poema de José,- The "Poem of

Joseph." It is, probably, the work of one of those Spanish Arabs who remained under the Castilian domination after the great body of their countrymen had retreated. It is written in the Castilian dialect, but in Arabic characters, as was not very uncommon with the writings of the Moriscoes. The story of Joseph is told, moreover, conformably to the version of the Koran, instead of that of the Hebrew Scriptures.

The manner in which the Spanish and the Arabic races were mingled together after the great invasion produced a strange confusion in their languages. The Christians who were content to dwell in their old places under the Moslem rule, while they retained their own language, not unfrequently adopted the alphabetical characters of their conquerors. Even the coins struck by some of the ancient Castilian princes, as they recovered their territory from the invaders, were stamped with Arabic letters. Not unfrequently, the archives and municipal records of the Spanish cities, for a considerable time after their restoration to their own princes, were also written in Arabic characters. On the other hand, as the great inundation gradually receded, the Moors who lingered behind under the Spanish sway often adopted the language of their conquerors, but retained their own written alphabet. In other words, the Christians kept their language and abandoned their alphabetical characters; while the Moslems kept their alphabetical characters and abandoned their language. The contrast is curious, and may, perhaps, be accounted for by the fact, that the superiority conceded by the Spaniards to the Arabic literature in this early period led the few scholars among them to adopt, for their own compositions, the characters in which that literature was written. The Moriscoes, on the other hand, did what was natural, when they retained their peculiar writing, to which they had been accustomed in the works of their countrymen, while they conformed to the Castilian language, to which they had become accustomed in daily intercourse with the Spaniard. However explained, the fact is curious. But it is time we should return to the Spanish Arab poem.

We give the following translation of some of its verses by Mr. Ticknor, with his few prefatory remarks:

"On the first night after the outrage, Jusuf, as he is called in