Note 169 — Chapter VI

Dominacion de los Árabes, Tom. I., Prólogo, pp. xviii.-xix., p. 169, and other places. But in a manuscript preface to a collection which he called “Poesías Orientales traducidas por Jos. Ant. Conde,” and which he never published, he expresses himself yet more positively: “In the versification of our Castilian ballads and seguidillas, we have received from the Arabs an exact type of their verses.” And again he says, “From the period of the infancy of our poetry, we have rhymed verses according to the measures used by the Arabs before the times of the Koran.” This is the work, I suppose, to which Blanco White alludes (Variedades, Tom. II. pp. 45, 46). The theory of Conde has been often approved. See Retrospective Review, Tom. IV. p. 31, the Spanish translation of Bouterwek, Tom. I. p. 164, etc.