Note 170 — Chapter VI

Argote de Molina (Discurso sobre la Poesía Castellana, in Conde Lucanor, 1575, f. 92) will have it that the ballad verse of Spain is quite the same with the eight-syllable verse in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French; “but,” he adds, “it is properly native to Spain, in whose language it is found earlier than in any other modern tongue, and in Spanish alone it has all the grace, gentleness, and spirit that are more peculiar to the Spanish genius than to any other.” The only example he cites in proof of this position is the Odes of Ronsard,—“the most excellent Ronsard,” as he calls him,—then at the height of his euphuistical reputation in France; but Ronsard’s odes are miserably unlike the freedom and spirit of the Spanish ballads. (See Odes de Ronsard, Paris, 1573, 18mo, Tom. II. pp. 62, 139.) The nearest approach that I recollect to the mere measure of the ancient Spanish ballad, where there was no thought of imitating it, is in a few of the old French Fabliaux, in Chaucer’s “House of Fame,” and in some passages of Sir Walter Scott’s poetry. Jacob Grimm, in his “Silva de Romances Viejos,” (Vienna, 1815, 18mo,) taken chiefly from the collection of 1555, has printed the ballads he gives us as if their lines were originally of fourteen or sixteen syllables; so that one of his lines embraces two of those in the old Romanceros. His reason was, that their epic nature and character required such long verses, which are in fact substantially the same with those in the old “Poem of the Cid.” But his theory, which was not generally adopted, is sufficiently answered by V. A. Huber, in his excellent tract, “De Primitivâ Cantilenarum Popularium Epicarum (vulgo, Romances) apud Hispanos Formâ,” (Berolini, 1844, 4to,) and in his preface to his edition of the “Chrónica del Cid,” 1844.