Note 361 — Chapter XI

Gomez de Zurara, in the outset of his “Chronicle of the Conde Don Pedro de Meneses,” says that he wishes to write an account only of “the things that happened in his own times, or of those which happened so near to his own times that he could have true knowledge of them.” This strengthens what he says concerning Lobeira, in the passage cited in the text from the opening of Chap. 63 of the Chronicle. The Ferdinand to whom Zurara there refers was the father of John I. and died in 1383. The Chronicle of Zurara is published by the Academy of Lisbon, in their “Colecção de Libros Ineditos de Historia Portuguesa,” Lisboa, 1792, fol., Tom. II. I have a curious manuscript “Dissertation on the Authorship of the Amadis de Gaula,” by Father Sarmiento, who wrote the valuable fragment of a History of Spanish Poetry to which I have often referred. This learned Galician is much confused and vexed by the question;—first denying that there is any authority at all for saying Lobeira wrote the Amadis; then asserting, that, if Lobeira wrote it, he was a Galician; then successively suggesting that it may have been written by Vasco Perez de Camões, by the Chancellor Ayala, by Montalvo, or by the Bishop of Cartagena;—all absurd conjectures, much connected with his prevailing passion to refer the origin of all Spanish poetry to Galicia. He does not seem to have been aware of the passage in Gomez de Zurara.