Note 541 — Chapter XVII

The discussion makes out two points quite clearly, viz.: 1st. There was a person named Jordi, who lived in the thirteenth century and in the time of Jayme the Conqueror, was much with that monarch, and wrote, as an eyewitness, an account of the storm from which the royal fleet suffered at sea, near Majorca, in September, 1269 (Ximeno, Escritores de Valencia, Tom. I. p. 1; and Fuster, Biblioteca Valentiana, Tom. I. p. 1); and, 2d. There was a person named Jordi, a poet in the fifteenth century; because the Marquis of Santillana, in his well-known letter, written between 1454 and 1458, speaks of such a person as having lived in his time. (See the letter in Sanchez, Tom. I. pp. lvi. and lvii., and the notes on it, pp. 81-85.) Now the question is, to which of these two persons belong the poems bearing the name of Jordi in the various Cancioneros; for example, in the “Cancionero General,” 1573, f. 301, and in the MS. Cancionero in the King’s Library at Paris, which is of the fifteenth century. (Torres Amat, pp. 328-333.) This question is of some consequence, because a passage attributed to Jordi is so very like one in the 103d sonnet of Petrarch, (Parte I.,) that one of them must be taken quite unceremoniously from the other. The Spaniards, and especially the Catalans, have generally claimed the lines referred to as the work of the elder Jordi, and so would make Petrarch the copyist;—a claim in which foreigners have sometimes concurred. (Retrospective Review, Vol. IV. pp. 46, 47, and Foscolo’s Essay on Petrarch, London, 1823, 8vo, p. 65.) But it seems to me difficult for an impartial person to read the verses printed by Torres Amat with the name of Jordi from the Paris MS. Cancionero, and not believe that they belong to the same century with the other poems in the same manuscript, and that thus the Jordi in question lived after 1400, and is the copyist of Petrarch. Indeed, the very position of these verses in such a manuscript seems to prove it, as well as their tone and character.