Note 434 — Chapter XIV

There is an edition of it (Madrid, 1786, 12mo) filling a hundred pages, to which is added a summary of the whole in a ballad of eighteen pages, which may have been intended for popular recitation. The last is not, perhaps, the work of Enzina. A similar pilgrimage, partly devout, partly poetical, was made a century later by Pedro de Escobar Cabeza de la Vaca, who published an account of it in 1587, (12mo,) at Valladolid, in twenty-five cantos of blank verse, entitled “Lucero de la Tierra Santa,”—A Lighthouse for the Holy Land. He went and returned by the way of Egypt, and at Jerusalem became a knight-templar; but his account of what he saw and did, though I doubt not it is curious for the history of geography, is as free from the spirit of poetry as can well be imagined. Nearly the whole of it, if not broken into verses, might be read as pure and dignified Castilian prose, and parts of it would have considerable merit as such.