Note 115 — Chapter IV

“Y el Conde tovo este por buen exemplo,”—an old Castilian formula. (Crónica General, Parte III. c. 5.) Argote de Molina says of such phrases, which abound in the Conde Lucanor, that “they give a taste of the old proprieties of the Castilian”; and elsewhere, that “they show what was the pure idiom of our tongue.” Don John himself, with his accustomed simplicity, says, “I have made up the book with the handsomest words I could.” (Ed. 1575, f. 1, b.) Many of his words, however, needed explanation in the reign of Philip the Second, and, on the whole, the phraseology of the Conde Lucanor sounds older than that of the Partidas, which were yet written nearly a century before it. Some of its obsolete words are purely Latin, like cras for to-morrow, f. 83, and elsewhere.