Volume 3 — APPENDIX.

APPENDIX, A.

ON THE ORIGIN OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE.

(See Vol. I. pp. 11 and 47.)

The country which now passes under the name of Spain has been subjected to a greater number of revolutions, that have left permanent traces in its population, language, and literature, than any other of the principal countries of modern Europe.[394] At different periods, within the reach of authentic record, it has been invaded and occupied by the Phœnicians, the Romans, the Goths, and the Arabs; all distinct races of men with peculiar characteristics, and forming, in their various combinations with each other or with the earlier masters of the soil, still new races hardly less separate and remarkable than themselves. From the intimate union of them all, gradually wrought by the changes and convulsions of nearly three thousand years, has arisen the present Spanish people, whose literature, extending back about seven centuries, has been examined in the preceding volumes.

But it is difficult fully to examine or understand the literature of any country, without understanding something, at least, of the original elements and history of the language in which it is contained, and on which no small portion of its essential character must depend; while, at the same time, a knowledge of the origin of the language necessarily implies some knowledge of the nations that, by successive contributions, have constituted it such as it is found in the final forms of its poetry and elegant prose. As a needful appendix, therefore, to the history of Spanish literature, a very brief account will be here given of the different occupants of the soil of the country, who, in a greater or less degree, have contributed to form the present character both of the Spanish people and of their language and culture.

The oldest of these, and the people who, since we can go back no farther, must be by us regarded as the original inhabitants of the Spanish Peninsula, were the Iberians. They appear, at the remotest period of which tradition affords us any notice, to have been spread over the whole territory, and to have given to its mountains, rivers, and cities most of the names they still bear,—a fierce race, whose power has never been entirely broken by any of the long line of invaders who, at different times, have occupied the rest of the country. Even at this moment, a body of their descendants, less affected than we should have supposed possible by intercourse with the various nations that have successively pressed their borders, is believed, with a good degree of probability, to be recognized under the name of Biscayans, inhabiting the mountains in the northwestern portion of modern Spain. But, whether this be true or not, the Biscayans, down to the present day, have been a singular and a separate race. They have a peculiar language, peculiar local institutions, and a literature which is carried back to a remoter antiquity than that of any other people now possessing, not the soil of the Spanish Peninsula merely, but of any part of Southern Europe. They are, in fact, a people who seem to have been left as a solitary race, hardly connected, even by those ties of language which outlive all others, with any race of men now in existence or on record; some of their present customs and popular fables claiming to have come down from an age, of which history and tradition give only doubtful intimations. The most probable conjecture yet proposed to explain what there is peculiar and remarkable about the Biscayans and their language is that which supposes them to be descended from those ancient and mysterious Iberians, whose language seems to have been, at one period, spread through the whole Peninsula, and to have left traces which are recognized even in the present Spanish.[395]

The first intruders upon the Iberians were the Celts, who, according to Doctor Percy’s theory, constituted the foremost wave of the successive emigrations that broke upon Europe from the overflowing multitudes of Asia. At what precise period the Celts reached Spain, or any other of the Western countries they overran, can no longer be determined. But the contest between the invaders of the soil and its possessors was, from the few intimations of it that have come down to us, long and bloody; and, as was generally the case in the early successful invasions of countries by wandering masses of the human race, portions of the ancient inhabitants were driven to the fastnesses of their mountains, and the remainder became gradually incorporated with the conquerors. The new people, thus formed of two races that, in antiquity, had the reputation of being warlike and powerful, was appropriately called the Celtiberian,[396] and constituted the body of the population which, broken into various tribes, but with similar manners and institutions, occupied the Peninsula when it first became known to the civilized nations of Europe. The language of the Celts, as might be expected, is represented in the present Spanish, as it is in the French and even in the Italian, though but slightly, of course, in any of them.[397]

Thus far, all access to Spain had been by land; for, in the earliest periods of the world’s history, no other mode of emigration or invasion was known. But the Phœnicians, the oldest commercial people of classical antiquity, soon afterwards found their way thither over the waters of the Mediterranean. At what time they arrived in Spain, or where they made their first establishment, is not known. A mystery hangs over this remarkable people, darker than belongs to the age in which they lived, and connected, no doubt, with the wary spirit in which they pursued their commercial adventures. Their position at home made colonization the obvious and almost the only means of commercial wealth among them, and Spain proved the most tempting of the countries to which their power could reach. Their chief Spanish colonies were near the Pillars of Hercules, in the neighbourhood of our present Cadiz, which they probably founded, and about the mouth and on the banks of the Guadalquivir. Their great object was the mines of precious metals with which ancient Spain abounded. For Spain, from the earliest notices of its history till the fall of the Roman Empire, was the El Dorado of the rest of the world, and furnished a large proportion of the materials for its circulating wealth.[398] During a long period, too, these mines seem to have been known only to the Phœnicians, who thus reserved to themselves the secret of a great power and influence over the nations near them, while, at the same time,—establishing colonies, as was their custom, to secure the sources of their wealth,—they carried their language and manners through a considerable part of the South of Spain, and even far round on the shores of the Atlantic.[399]

But the Phœnicians had still earlier founded a colony on the northern coast of Africa, which, under the name of Carthage, was destined to grow more powerful than the country that sent it forth. Its means were the same; for the Carthaginians became eminently a commercial people, and depended, in no small degree, upon the resources of their colonies. They trod closely and almost constantly in the footsteps of their mother country, and often supplanted her power. It was, in fact, through the Phœnician colonies that the Carthaginians entered Spain, whose tempting territory was divided from them only by the Mediterranean. But for a long period, though they maintained a large military force in Cadiz, and stretched their possessions boldly and successfully along the Spanish shores, they did not seem inclined to penetrate far into the interior, or to do more than occupy enough of the country to overawe its population and control its trade. When, however, the First Punic War had rendered Spain of more consequence to the Carthaginians than it had ever been before, they undertook its entire conquest and occupation. Under Hamilcar, the father of Hannibal, about two hundred and twenty-seven years before the Christian era, they spread themselves at once over nearly the whole country, as far as the Iberus, and, building Carthagena and some other strong places, seemed to have taken final possession of the Peninsula, on which the Romans had not yet set foot.

The Romans, however, were not slow to perceive the advantage their dangerous rivals had gained. By the first treaty of peace made between these great powers, it was stipulated, that the Carthaginians should advance no farther,—should neither molest Saguntum nor cross the Iberus. Hannibal violated these conditions, and the Second Punic War broke out, two hundred and eighteen years before the Christian era. The Scipios entered Spain in consequence of it; and at its conclusion, in the year B. C. 201, the Carthaginians had no longer any possessions in Europe, though, as descendants of the Phœnicians, they left in the population and language of Spain traces which have never been wholly obliterated.[400]

But,[401] though, by the Second Punic War, the Carthaginians were thus driven from the Spanish Peninsula, the Romans were far from having obtained unmolested or secure possession of it. The Carthaginians themselves, even when engaged in a commerce whose spirit was, on the whole, peaceful, had never ceased to be in contest with the warlike Celtiberian tribes of the interior; and the Romans were obliged to accept the inheritance of a warfare to which, in their character of intruders, they naturally succeeded. The Roman Senate, indeed, according to their usual policy, chose to regard Spain, from the end of the Second Punic War, both as conquered and as a province; and, in truth, they had really obtained permanent and quiet possession of a considerable part of it. But, from the time when the Roman armies first entered the Peninsula until they became masters of the whole of it,—except the mountains of the Northwest, which never yielded to their power,—two complete centuries elapsed, filled with bloodshed and crime. No province cost the Roman people a price so great. The struggle for Numantia, which lasted fourteen years, the wars against Viriates, and the war of Sertorius,—to say nothing of that between Pompey and Cæsar,—all show the formidable character of the protracted contest by which alone the Roman power could be confirmed in the Peninsula; so that, though Spain was the first portion of the continent out of Italy which the Romans began to occupy as a province, it was the very last of which their possession was peaceful and unquestioned.[402]

From the outset, however, there was a tendency to a union between the two races, wherever the conquerors were able to establish quietness and order; for the vast advantages of Roman civilization could be obtained only by the adoption of Roman manners and the Latin language. This union, from the great importance of the province, the Romans desired no less than the natives. Forty-seven years only after they entered Spain, a colony, consisting of a large body of the descendants from the mingled blood of Romans and natives, was established by a formal decree of the Senate, with privileges beyond the usual policy of their government.[403] A little later, colonies of all kinds were greatly multiplied; and it is impossible to read Cæsar and Livy without feeling that the Roman policy was more generous to Spain, than it was to any other of the countries that successively came within its control. Tarragona, where the Scipios first landed, Carthagena, founded by Asdrubal, and Córdova, always so important, early took the forms and character of the larger municipalities in Italy; and, in the time of Strabo, Cadiz, for numbers, wealth, and activity, was second only to Rome itself.[404] Long, therefore, before Agrippa had broken the power of the mountaineers at the North, the whole South, with its rich and luxuriant valleys, had become like another Italy; a fact, of which the descriptions in the third book of Pliny’s Natural History can leave no reasonable doubt. To this, however, we should add the remarkable circumstance, that the Emperor Vespasian, soon after the pacification of the North, found it for his interest to extend to the whole of Spain the privileges of the municipalities in Latium.[405]

Spaniards, too, earlier than any other strangers, obtained those distinctions of which the Romans themselves were so ambitious, and which they so reluctantly granted to any but native citizens. The first foreigner that ever rose to the consulship was Balbus, from Cadiz, and he, too, was the first foreigner that ever gained the honors of a public triumph. The first foreigner that ever sat on the throne of the world was Trajan, a native of Italica, near Seville;[406] and indeed, if we examine the history of Rome from the time of Hannibal to the fall of the Western Empire, we shall probably find that no part of the world, beyond the limits of Italy, contributed so much to the resources, wealth, and power of the capital, as Spain, and that no province received, in return, so large a share of the honors and dignities of the Roman government.

On all accounts, therefore, the connection between Rome and Spain was intimate, and the civilization and refinement of the province took their character early from those of the capital. Sertorius found it a wise policy to cause the children of the principal native families to be taught Latin and Greek, and to become accomplished in the literature and elegant knowledge to be found in those admirable languages;[407] and when, ten years later, Metellus, in his turn, had crushed the power of Sertorius, and came home triumphant to Rome, he brought with him a number of native Cordovan poets, against whose Latinity the fastidious ear of Cicero was able to object only that their accent had pingue quiddam ... atque peregrinum,—something thick, or rude, and foreign.[408]

From this period Latin writers began to be constantly produced in Spain.[409] Portius Latro, a native of Córdova, but a public advocate of the highest reputation at Rome, opened in the metropolis the earliest of those schools for Roman rhetoric, that afterwards became so numerous and so famous, and, among other distinguished men, numbered as his disciples Octavius Cæsar, Mæcenas, Marcus Agrippa, and Ovid. The two Senecas were Spaniards, and so was Lucan; names celebrated enough, certainly, to have conferred lasting glory on any city within the limits of the Empire. Martial came from Bilbilis, and, in his old age, retired there again to die in peace, amidst the scenes which, during his whole life, seem to have been dear to him. Columella, too, the best of the Roman writers on agriculture, was a Spaniard; and so, it is probable, were Quinctilian and Silius Italicus. Many others might be added, whose rights and reputation were fully acknowledged in the capital of the world, during the last days of the Republic, or the best days of the Empire, as orators, poets, and historians; but their works, though famous in their own time, have perished in the general wreck of the larger part of ancient literature. The great lights, however, of Roman letters in Spain are familiar to all, and are at once recognized as constituting an important portion of the body of the Latin classics, and an essential part of the glory of Roman civilization.[410]

After this period, no considerable change, that needs to be noticed, took place in the Spanish Peninsula, until the final overthrow of the Roman power.[411] Undoubtedly, at the Northwest, and especially among the mountains and valleys of what is now called Biscay, the language and institutions of Rome were never established;[412] but, in all the remainder of the country, whatever there was of public policy or intellectual refinement rested on the basis of the Roman character and of Roman civilization. But the Roman character and civilization decayed there, as they did everywhere, and though, during the last four centuries in which the Imperial authority was acknowledged in Spain, the country enjoyed more of tranquillity than was enjoyed in any other province within the limits of the Empire, still, like the others, it was much disturbed during the whole of this fatal period, and was gradually yielding to the common destiny.

It was during this troubled interval, that another great cause of change was introduced into Spain, and began to produce its wide effects on whatever of intellectual culture existed in the country. This great cause was Christianity. The precise point of time, or the precise mode, of its first appearance in Spain cannot now be determined. But it was certainly taught there in the second century, and seems to have come in, through the southern coast, from Africa.[413] At first, as elsewhere, it was persecuted, and therefore professed in secret; but, as early as the year 300, churches had been publicly established, and from the time of Constantine and Osius of Córdova, it was the acknowledged and prevalent religion of large parts of the country. What is of consequence to us is, that the language of Christianity in Spain was the Latin. Its instructions were obviously given in Latin, and its early literature, so far as it appeared in Spain, is found wholly in that language.[414] This is very important, not only because it proves the great diffusion of the Latin language there from the third century to the eighth, but because it shows that no other language was left strong enough to contend with it, at least through the middle and southern portions of the country.

The Christian clergy, however, it must be recollected, did little or nothing to preserve the purity of the Latin language in Spain, or to maintain whatever of an intellectual tone they found in the institutions established by the Romans.[415] How early these institutions, and especially the ancient schools, decayed there, we do not know; but it was earlier than in some other parts of the Empire. In the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries even the ecclesiastics were sunk into the grossest ignorance, so that, when Gregory the Great, who was Pope from 590 to 604, warned Licinian, Bishop of Carthagena, not to give consecration to persons without education, Licinian replied, that, unless it were permitted to consecrate those who knew only that Christ had been crucified, none could be found to fill the priestly office.[416] In fact, Isidore of Seville, the famous Archbishop and saint, who died in 636, is the last of the Spanish ecclesiastics that attempted to write Latin with purity; and even he thought so ill of classical antiquity, that he prohibited the monks under his control from reading books written by heathen of the olden time;[417] thus taking away the only means of preserving from its threatened corruption the language they wrote and spoke.[418] Of course this corruption advanced, in times of confusion and national trouble, at a rapid pace, until the spoken language of the country became, to those out of it, an almost unintelligible jargon; and the offices of the Church, as they were read at mass and on feast days, could no longer be understood by the body of the worshippers. This was the result, partly of the decay of all the Roman institutions, and, indeed, of all the principles on which those institutions had rested, and partly of the invasion and conquest of the country by the Northern barbarians, whose irruption, with the violences that followed it, left for a long time neither the quietness nor the sense of security necessary even to the humblest intellectual culture.[419]

This great irruption of the Northern barbarians effected another and most important revolution in the language of the Peninsula. It in fact gave to it a new character. For the race of men by whom it was made was entirely different, both in its origin, its language, and, indeed, in all that goes to make up national character, from the four races that had previously occupied the country. The new invaders belonged to those vast multitudes beyond the Rhine, who had been much known to the Romans from the time of Julius Cæsar, and who, at the period of which we speak, had been, for above a century, leaning with a portentous weight upon the failing barriers, which, on the banks of that glorious stream, had long marked the limits of Roman power. Urged forward, not only by the natural disposition of Northern nations to come into a milder climate, and of barbarous nations to obtain the spoils of civilization, but by uneasy movements among the Tartars of Upper Asia, which were communicated through the Sclavonic tribes to those of Germany, their accumulated masses burst, in the beginning of the fifth century, with an irresistible impulse, on the wide and ill-defended borders of the Empire. Without noticing the tumultuous attempts that preceded this final and fatal invasion and were either defeated or turned aside, it is enough to say, that the first hordes of the irruption which succeeded in overthrowing the empire of the world began to pass the Rhine at the end of the year 406, and in the beginning of 407. These hordes, however, were pressed forward, it may be said almost without a figure, by the merely physical weight of the large bodies that followed them. Tribe succeeded tribe, with all the facility and haste of a nomadic life, which knows neither local attachments nor local interests, and with all the eagerness and violence of barbarians seeking the grosser luxuries of civilization; so that when, at the end of that century, the last of the greater warlike emigrations had forced for itself a place within the limits of the Roman empire, it may be truly said, that, from the Rhine and the British Channel on the one side, to Calabria and Gibraltar on the other, there was hardly a spot of that empire over which they had not passed, and few where they were not then to be found possessors of the soil, and masters of the political and military power.[420]

In the particular character of the multitudes that finally established themselves within its territory, Spain was certainly less unfortunate than were most of the countries of Europe, that were in a similar manner invaded. The first tribes that rushed over the Pyrenees—the Franks, who came before the general invasion, and the Vandali, the Alani, and the Suevi, who, as far as Spain was concerned, formed its vanguard—committed, no doubt, atrocious excesses, and produced a state of cruel suffering, which is eloquently and indignantly described in a well-known passage of Mariana;[421] but, after a comparatively short period, these tribes or nations passed over into Africa and never returned. The Goths, who succeeded them as invaders, were, it is true, barbarians, like their predecessors, but they were barbarians of a milder and more generous type. They had already been in Italy, where they had become somewhat acquainted with the Roman laws, manners, and language; and when, in 411, they traversed the South of France and entered the Peninsula, they were received rather as friends than as conquerors.[422] Indeed, at first, their authority was exercised in the name and on behalf of the Empire; but, before the century was ended, the last Emperor of the West had ceased to reign; and, by a sort of inevitable necessity, the Visigoth dynasty was established throughout nearly the whole of Spain, and acknowledged by Odoacer, the earliest of the barbarian kings of Italy.

Previously, however, to the entrance of the Visigoths into Spain, they had been converted to Christianity by the venerable Ulfilas; and, as early as 466-484, in a period of great confusion, they had formed for themselves a criminal code of laws, to which, in 506, they added a civil code,—the two being subsequently made to constitute the basis of that important body of laws which, above a century later, was compiled by the fourth Council of Toledo.[423] But, though the Visigoths had thus adopted some of the most important means of civilization, their language, like that of the rest of the Northern invaders, remained essentially barbarous. It was never, at any time, in Spain, a written language. It was of the Teutonic stock, and had nothing, or almost nothing, in common with the Latin. Still, the people who spoke it were so intimately mingled with the conquered people, and each, from its position, had become so dependent on the other, that it was no longer a question whether they should find some medium of communication suited to the daily and hourly intercourse of common life. They were, in fact, compelled to do so. The same consequences, therefore, followed, that followed in the other Roman or Romanized countries which were invaded in the same way. A union of the two languages took place; but not a union on equal terms. This was impossible. For on the side of the Latin were not only the existing, though decayed, institutions of the country, but whatever of civilization and refinement was still to be found in the world, as well as the vast and growing power of the Christian religion, with its organized priesthood, which refused to be heard in any other language. So that, if the Goths, on their part, had the political and military authority, and even a more fresh and vigorous intellectual character, they were obliged, on the whole, to submit to such prevalent influences, and to adopt, in a great degree, the language through which alone they could obtain the benefits of a more advanced state of society. The Latin, therefore, corrupted and degraded as it was, remained in Spain, as it did in the other countries where similar races of men came together, by far the most prominent element in the language that grew out of their union, and was thus made to constitute the grand basis of the modern Spanish.

The most considerable change effected by the invaders in the language they found established in Spain was a change in its grammatical structure. The Goths, like any uncivilized people, could learn the individual words of the more cultivated language they every day heard, easier than they could comprehend the philosophical spirit of its grammar. While, therefore, they freely adopted the large and convenient vocabulary of the Latin, they compelled its complicated forms and constructions to yield to the simpler constructions and habits of their own native dialects. This may be illustrated by the striking changes they wrought in the established inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. The Romans, it is well known, had strict declensions to mark the relations of their nouns, and strict conjugations by which they distinguished the times of their verbs. The Goths had neither, but used articles united with prepositions to mark the cases of their nouns, and auxiliaries of different kinds to mark the changes in the meanings of their verbs.[424]

When, therefore, in Spain, they received the Latin, where no article existed, they compelled ille, as the nearest word they could find, to serve for their definite article, and unus for their indefinite,—so that, in their oldest deeds and other documents, we find such phrases as ille homo, the man; unus homo, a man; illa mulier, the woman; and so on,—from which the modern Spanish derives its articles el and la, uno, una, etc., just as the French, by a similar process, obtained the articles le and la, un and une, and the Italians il and la, uno and una.[425] The same sort of compromise took place in relation to the verbs. Instead of vici, I have conquered, they said habeo victus; instead of saying amor, I am loved, they said sum amatus; and from such a use of habere and esse, they introduced into the modern Spanish the auxiliaries haber and ser, as the Italians introduced avere and essere, and the French avoir and être.[426] This example of the effect produced by the Goths on the nouns and verbs of the Latin is but a specimen of the changes they brought about in the general structure of that language, by which they contributed their full share towards still further corrupting it, as well as towards modelling it into the present Spanish;—a great revolution, which it required above seven centuries fairly to accomplish, and two or three centuries more entirely to carry out into all its final results.[427]

But, in the mean time, another tremendous invasion had burst upon Spain; violent, unforeseen, and for a time threatening to sweep away all the civilization and refinement, that had been preserved from the old institutions of the country, or were springing up under the new. This was the remarkable invasion of the Arabs, which compels us now to seek some of the materials of the Spanish character, language, and literature in the heart of Asia, as we have already been obliged to seek for some of them in the extreme North of Europe.

The Arabs, who, at every period of their history, have been a picturesque and extraordinary people, received, from the passionate religion given to them by the genius and fanaticism of Mohammed, an impulse that, in most respects, is unparalleled. As late as the year of Christ 623, the fortunes and the fate of the Prophet were still uncertain, even within the narrow limits of his own wild and wandering tribe; yet, in less than a century from that time, not only Persia, Syria, and nearly the whole of Western Asia, but Egypt and all the North of Africa had yielded to the power of his military faith. A success so wide and so rapid, founded on religious enthusiasm, and so speedily followed by the refinements of civilization, is unlike any thing else in the history of the world.[428]

When the Arabs had obtained a tolerably quiet possession of the cities and coasts of Africa, it was natural they should turn next to Spain, from which they were separated only by the straits of the Mediterranean. Their descent was made, in great force, near Gibraltar, in 711; the battle of the Guadalete, as it is called by the Moorish writers, and of Xerez, as it is called by the Christians, followed immediately; and, in the course of three years, they had, with their accustomed celerity, conquered the whole of Spain, except the fated region of the Northwest, behind whose mountains a large body of Christians, under Pelayo, retreated, leaving the rest of their country in the hands of the conquerors.

But while the Christians, who had escaped from the wreck of the Gothic power, were thus either shut up in the mountains of Biscay and Asturias, or engaged in that desperate struggle of nearly eight centuries, which ended in the final expulsion of their invaders, the Moors[429] throughout the centre and especially throughout the South of Spain were enjoying an empire as splendid and intellectual as the elements of their religion and civilization would permit.

Much has been said concerning the glory of this empire, and the effect it has produced on the literature and manners of modern times. Long ago, a disposition was shown by Huet and Massieu to trace to them the origin both of rhyme and of romantic fiction; but both are now generally admitted to have been, as it were, spontaneous productions of the human mind, which different nations at different periods have invented separately for themselves.[430] Somewhat later, Father Andres, a learned Spaniard, who wrote in Italy and in Italian, anxious to give to his own country the honor of imparting to the rest of Europe the first impulse to refinement after the fall of the Roman empire, conceived the theory, at once broader and more definite than that of Huet, that the poetry and cultivation of the Troubadours of Provence, which are generally admitted to be the oldest of Southern Europe in modern times, were derived entirely and immediately from the Arabs of Spain; a theory which has been adopted by Ginguené, by Sismondi, and by the authors of the “Literary History of France.”[431] But they all go upon the presumption that rhyme and metrical composition, as well as a poetic spirit, were awakened later in Provence than subsequent inquiries show them to have been. For Father Andres and his followers date the communication of the Arabian influences of Spain upon the South of France from the capture of Toledo in 1085, when, no doubt, there was a great increase of intercourse between the two countries.[432] But Raynouard[433] has since published the fragment of a poem, the manuscript of which can hardly be dated so late as the year 1000, and has thus shown that the Provençal literature is to be carried back above a century earlier, and traced to the period of the gradual corruption of the Latin, and the gradual formation of the modern language. The elder Schlegel, too, has entered into the discussion of the theory itself, and left little reason to doubt that Raynouard’s positions on the subject are well founded.[434]

But, though we cannot, with Father Andres and his followers, trace the poetry and refinement of all the South of Europe in modern times primarily or mainly to the Arabs of Spain, we must still, so far as the Spanish language and literature are concerned, trace something to them. For their progress in refinement was hardly less brilliant and rapid than their progress in empire. The reigns of the two Abderrahmans, and the period of the glory of Córdova, which began about 750 and continued almost to the time of its conquest by the Christians in 1236, were more intellectual than could then be found elsewhere; and if the kingdom of Granada, which ended in 1492, was less refined, it was, perhaps, even more splendid and luxurious.[435] The public schools and libraries of the Spanish Arabs were resorted to, not only by those of their own faith at home and in the East, but by Christians from different parts of Europe; and Pope Sylvester the Second, one of the most remarkable men of his age, is believed to have owed his elevation to the pontificate to the culture he received in Seville and Córdova.[436]

In the midst of this flourishing empire lived large masses of native Christians, who had not retreated with their hardy brethren under Pelayo to the mountains of the Northwest, but dwelt among their conquerors, protected by the wide toleration which the Mohammedan religion originally prescribed and practised. Indeed, except that, as a vanquished people, they paid double the tribute paid by Moors, and that they were taxed for their Church property, these Christians were little burdened or restrained, and were even permitted to have their bishops, churches, and monasteries, and to be judged by their own laws and their own tribunals, whenever the question at issue was one that related only to themselves, unless it involved a capital punishment.[437] But, though they were thus to a certain degree preserved as a separate people, and though, considering their peculiar position, they maintained, more than would be readily believed, their religious loyalty, still the influence of a powerful and splendid empire, and of a population every way more prosperous and refined than themselves, was constantly pressing upon them. The inevitable result was, that, in the course of ages, they gradually yielded something of their national character. They came, at last, to wear the Moorish dress; they adopted Moorish manners; and they served in the Moorish armies and in the places of honor at the courts of Córdova and Granada. In all respects, indeed, they deserved the name given to them, that of Mozárabes or Muçárabes, persons who seemed to become Arabs in manners and language; for they were so mingled with their conquerors and masters, that, in process of time, they could be distinguished from the Arabs amidst whom they lived by little except their faith.[438]

The effect of all this on whatever of the language and literature of Rome still survived among them was, of course, early apparent. The natives of the soil who dwelt among the Moors soon neglected their degraded Latin, and spoke Arabic. In 794, the conquerors thought they might already venture to provide schools for teaching their own language to their Christian subjects, and require them to use no other.[439] Alvarus Cordubensis, who wrote his “Indiculus Luminosus” in 854,[440] and who is a competent witness on such a subject, shows that they had succeeded; for he complains that, in his time, the Christians neglected their Latin, and acquired Arabic to such an extent that hardly one Christian in a thousand was to be found who could write a Latin letter to a brother in the faith, while many were able to write Arabic poetry so as to rival the Moors themselves.[441] Such, indeed, was the early prevalence of the Arabic, that John, Bishop of Seville, one of those venerable men who commanded the respect alike of Christians and Mohammedans, found it necessary to translate the Scriptures into it, because his flock could read them in no other language.[442] Even the records of Christian churches were often kept in Arabic from this period down through several succeeding centuries, and in the archives of the cathedral at Toledo, above two thousand documents were recently and are probably still to be seen, written chiefly by Christians and ecclesiastics, in Arabic.[443]

Nor was this state of things at once changed when the Christians from the North prevailed again; for, after the reconquest of some of the central portions of the country, the coins struck by Christian kings to circulate among their Christian subjects were covered with Arabic inscriptions, as may be seen in coins of Alfonso the Sixth and Alfonso the Eighth, in the years 1185, 1186, 1191, 1192, 1199, and 1212.[444] And in 1256 Alfonso the Wise, when, by a solemn decree dated at Burgos, 18th December, he was making provision for education at Seville, established Arabic schools there, as well as Latin.[445] Indeed, still later, and even down to the fourteenth century, the public acts and monuments of that part of Spain were often written in Arabic, and the signatures to important ecclesiastical documents, though the body of the instrument might be in Latin or Spanish, were sometimes made in the Arabic character, as they are in a grant of privileges by Ferdinand the Fourth to the monks of Saint Clement.[446] So that almost as late as the period of the conquest of Granada, and in some respects later, it is plain that the language, manners, and civilization of the Arabs were still much diffused among the Christian population of the centre and South of Spain.

When, therefore, the Christians from the North, after a contest the most bitter and protracted, had rescued the greater part of their country from thraldom, and driven the Moors before them into its southwestern provinces, they found themselves, as they advanced, surrounded by large masses of their ancient countrymen, Christians, indeed, in faith and feeling, though most imperfect in Christian knowledge and morals, but Moors in dress, manners, and language. A union, of course, took place between these different bodies, who, by the fortunes of war, had been separated from each other so long, that, though originally of the same stock and still connected by some of the strongest sympathies of our nature, they had for centuries ceased to possess a common language in which alone it would be possible to carry on the daily intercourse of life. But such a reunion of the two parts of the nation, wherever and whenever it occurred, necessarily implied an immediate modification or accommodation of the language that was to be used by both. No doubt, such a modification of the Gothicized and corrupted Latin had been going on, in some degree, from the time of the Moorish conquest. But now it was indispensable that it should be completed. A considerable infusion of the Arabic, therefore, quickly took place;[447] and the last important element was thus added to the present Spanish, which has been polished and refined, indeed, by subsequent centuries of progress in knowledge and civilization, but is still, in its prominent features, the same that it appeared soon after what, with characteristic nationality, is called the Restoration of Spain.[448]

The language, however, which was thus brought from the North by the Christian conquerors, and became modified as it advanced among the Moorish population of the South, was, as we have seen, by no means the classical Latin. It was Latin corrupted, at first, by the causes which had corrupted that language throughout the Roman empire, even before the overthrow of the Roman power,—then by the inevitable effect of the establishment in Spain of the Goths and other barbarians immediately afterwards,—and subsequently by additions from the original Iberian or Basque, made during the residence of the Christians, after the Moorish conquest, among the mountaineers, with whom that language had never ceased to prevail. But the principal cause of the final degradation of the Latin at the North, after the middle of the eighth century, was, no doubt, the miserable condition of the people who spoke it. They had fled from the ruins of the Latinized kingdom of the Goths, pursued by the fiery sword of the Moslem, and found themselves crowded together in the wild fastnesses of the Biscayan and Asturian mountains. There, deprived of the social institutions in which they had been nurtured, and which, however impaired or ruined, yet represented and retained to the last whatever of civilization had been left in their unhappy country; mingled with a people who, down to that time, appear to have shaken off little of the barbarism that had resisted alike the invasion of the Romans and of the Goths; and pent up, in great numbers, within a territory too small, too rude, and too poor to afford them the means of a tolerable subsistence, the Christians at the North seem to have sunk at once into a state nearly approaching that of savage life,—a state, of course, in which no care or thought would be given to preserve the purity of the language they spoke.[449] Nor was their condition much more favorable for such purposes when, with the vigor of despair, they began to recover the country they had lost. For they were then constantly in arms and constantly amidst the perils and sufferings of an exhausting warfare, embittered and exasperated by intense national and religious hatreds. When, therefore, as they advanced with their conquests towards the south and the east, they found themselves coming successively in contact with those portions of their race that had remained among the Moors, they felt that they were at once in the presence of a civilization and refinement altogether superior to their own.

The result was inevitable. The change, which, as has been said, now took place in their language, was governed by this peculiar circumstance in their position. For, as the Goths, between the fifth and eighth centuries, received a vast number of words from the Latin because it was the language of a people with whom they were intimately mingled and who were much more intellectual and advanced than themselves, so now, for the same reason, the whole nation received, between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, another increase of their vocabulary from the Arabic, and accommodated themselves, in a remarkable degree, to the advanced cultivation of their Southern countrymen and of their new Moorish subjects.

At what precise period the language, since called the Spanish and Castilian, can be said to have been formed by this union of the Gothicized and corrupted Latin that came from the North with the Arabic of the South, cannot now be determined.[450] Such a union was, from its nature, brought about by one of those gradual and silent changes in what belongs essentially to the character of a whole people, which can leave behind them no formal monuments or exact records. But the learned Marina, who may perhaps be safely trusted on this point, asserts that no document in the Castilian language, with a date anterior to the year 1140, exists, or, in his opinion, ever did exist.[451] Indeed the oldest yet cited is a confirmation of privileges by Alfonso the Seventh, in the year 1155, to the city of Avilés in Asturias.[452] However gradual, therefore, and indistinct may have been the formation and first appearance of the Castilian as the spoken language of modern Spain, we may no doubt feel sure, that, about the middle of the twelfth century, it had risen to the dignity of being a written language, and had begun to appear in the important public documents of the time.

From this period, then, we are to recognize the existence in Spain of a language spreading gradually through the greater part of the country, different from the pure or the corrupted Latin, and still more different from the Arabic, yet obviously formed by a union of both, modified by the analogies and spirit of the Gothic constructions and dialects, and containing some remains of the vocabularies of the Germanic tribes, of the Iberians, the Celts, and the Phœnicians, who, at different periods, had occupied nearly or quite the whole of the Peninsula. This language was called originally the Romance, because it was so much formed out of the language of the Romans; just as the Christians, in the northwestern mountains, were called by the Arabs Alromi, because they were imagined to be descended from the Romans.[453] Later, it was called Spanish, from the name taken by the whole people, and perhaps, at last, it was even more frequently called Castilian, from that portion of the country, whose political power grew to be so predominant, as to give its dialect a preponderance over all the other dialects, which, like the Galician, the Catalonian, and the Valencian, were, for a longer or shorter period, written languages, each with claims to a literature of its own.

The proportion of materials contributed by each of the languages that enter into the composition of the Spanish has never been accurately settled, though enough is known to permit an adjustment of their general relations to each other. Sarmiento, who investigated the subject with some care, thinks that six tenths of the present Castilian are of Latin origin; one tenth Greek and ecclesiastical; one tenth Northern; one tenth Arabic; and the remaining tenth East Indian and American, Gypsy, modern German, French, and Italian. Probably this estimate is not very far from the truth. But Larramendi and Humboldt leave no doubt that the Basque should be added; and, while Marina’s inquiries give a smaller proportion to the Arabic, those of Gayangos raise it to an eighth. The main point, however, is one concerning which there can be no doubt;—the broad foundations of the Castilian are to be sought in the Latin, to which, in fact, we are to trace nearly or quite all the contributions sometimes attributed to the Greek.[454]

The Spanish, or Castilian, language thus formed was introduced into general use sooner and more easily than, perhaps, any other of the newly created languages, which, as the confusion of the Middle Ages passed off, were springing up, throughout the South of Europe, to take the place of the universal language of the Roman world. The reasons of this were, that the necessity for its creation and employment was more urgent, from the extraordinary relations between the Moors, the Muçárabes, and the Christians; that the reign of Saint Ferdinand, at least as late as the capture of Seville in 1247, was a period, if not of quiet, yet of prosperity and almost of splendor; and that the Latin, both as a written and a spoken language, had become so much degraded, that it could offer less resistance to change in Spain than in the other countries where a similar revolution was in progress.[455] We must not be surprised, therefore, to find, not only specimens, but even considerable monuments, of Spanish literature soon after the first recognized appearance of the language itself. The narrative poem of the Cid, for instance, cannot be dated later than the year 1200; and Berceo, who flourished from 1220 to 1240, though he almost apologizes for not writing in Latin,[456] and thus shows how certainly he lived in the debatable period between the two languages, has left us a large mass of genuine Spanish, or Castilian, verse. But it is a little later, and in the reign of Alfonso the Tenth, from 1252 to 1282, that we are to consider the introduction of the Spanish, as a written, a settled, and a polite language, to have been recognized and completed. By his order, the Bible was translated into it from the Vulgate; he required all contracts and legal instruments to be written in it, and all law proceedings to be held in it; and, finally, by his own remarkable code, “Las Siete Partidas,” he at once laid the foundations for the extension and establishment of its authority as far as the Spanish race and power should prevail.[457] From this period, therefore, we are to look for the history and development of the Spanish language, in the body of Spanish literature.

APPENDIX, B.

ON THE ROMANCEROS.

(See Vol. I. p. 128.)

As the earliest ballads were not by known authors, but were gathered at different times, from the traditions of the people, it is impossible to understand their history without understanding something of the history of the Ballad-books in which they are found. A sketch of such a history has been written, with much knowledge of the subject, by Ferdinand Wolf, and is found in the “Jahrbücher der Literatur” (Band CXIV., Wien, 1846, pp. 1-72). I do not willingly enter into a discussion so peculiarly within the province of this distinguished scholar; but, as I possess, or have seen, several very early Ballad-books which he does not mention, and am besides unable to agree with him as to which is the oldest of them all, and therefore the most important, I will, as briefly as I can, give my views of this obscure branch of bibliography; confining myself, where it is possible to do so, to what has not before been published, and touching the whole matter only so far as it concerns the history of Spanish poetry.

A considerable number of ballads, printed on one or more sheets, in black letter, for popular use, may still be found. Such are “El Conde Alarcos”; “El Moro Calaynos”; a collection of twelve separate pieces, and a collection of fifty-nine, sold at Heber’s sale; with others noticed by Brunet, under the head of Romances Séparées, in his article “Romanceros.” But they are all without dates; it is extremely uncertain when any one of them was printed; and it seems to me, judging from those I have seen, to be more probable, that they were taken from collections now known to exist or to have existed, than that they helped to make up those collections,—the oldest of which claims to have been taken from the memories of the people, and from imperfect manuscript copies circulating only for popular use.

1. The first separate collection of ballads ever published was, I think, the one printed at Saragossa, under the title of “Silva de Varios Romances,” by Stevan G. de Nagera, in two parts, 1550. (See Brunet, Manuel du Libraire, ed. 1843, art. Silva.) I have seen a copy of this Silva belonging, in 1838, to M. Henri Ternaux-Compans, of Paris. In a prefatory address to the First Part, the collector says, “I have taken the trouble in this Silva to bring together all the ballads that have come to my knowledge”; adding afterwards, “It may be that some, though very few, of the old ballads are wanting, which I have not inserted, either because they did not come to my knowledge, or because I did not find them so complete and perfect as I wished. Nor do I deny, that, in some of those here printed, there may be an occasional error; but this is to be imputed to the copies from which I took them, which were very corrupt, and to the weakness of memory of some persons, who dictated them to me, and who could not recollect them perfectly. I did all I could to obtain the least faulty that were to be had, and had no little trouble to collect and amend them, and add to some that were imperfect. However, I wished they should stand in some order, and so I placed, first, those of devotion and from the Holy Scriptures; next, those that relate Castilian stories; next, those of Troy; and, lastly, those that relate to affairs of love.” After these ballads, which fill one hundred and ninety-six leaves, he gives us twenty-five leaves of canciones, villancicos, and chistes, or jests, among which, at folio 199, is the well-known witty Dialogue of Castillejo and his Pen. At the end of the First Part, folio 221, we have the following Address to the Reader, in which the collector has evidently changed his mind about having obtained all but a “very few of the old ballads” known to exist; for he now says: “Some of my friends, as they knew I was printing this ‘Cancionero,’ brought me many ballads, in order that I might insert them; but as we were coming to the end of the printing, I chose not to put them in, since they would interrupt the order that had been begun; but rather to make another volume, which will be the Second Part of this ‘Silva de Varios Romances,’ which is now in the press. Vale.”

This “Segunda Parte” was published in the same year, 1550, and consists of two hundred and three leaves of ballads, nineteen leaves of chistes, and two leaves of contents, at the end of which the “Impresor” says: “I did not wish to put into this part any more of those short chistes, because, if God pleases, they will be put into the Third Part, with other things agreeable to the curious reader. Vale.” I know of no copy of this Third Part; but it is possible it was printed, because, in the “Silva de Varios Romances,” of which Wolf and Brunet mention several editions between 1578 and 1673, and of which I possess that of 1602, the title-page declares that it contains “los mejores romances de los tres libros de la Silva.”

2. The first two parts, however, combined into one, but omitting the chistes, etc., soon appeared at Antwerp, printed by Martin Nucio, a well-known publisher, with considerable additions, but without the date of its publication. The Preface is in nearly the same words with that of the Silva of Nagera, Parte I.; but, when it announces the arrangement of the ballads, it changes their order, and puts “first, those that speak of France and the Twelve Peers; then, those that relate Castilian stories; then, those of Troy; and, lastly, those that treat of affairs of love.” Some of the ballads of the Saragossa collection are omitted, and the whole is called “Cancionero de Romances.” There is a copy of it in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsénal at Paris; and that it is subsequent to the Saragossa Silva, and taken from it, seems certain, because one must be taken from the other, and the note at the end of the Silva, Parte I., shows that the Saragossa Silva was collected and printed at different times; while the arrangement of the ballads in the Cancionero of Antwerp shows that they were necessarily all present to the editor when he put his work together. Besides, how should Nucio collect ballads from the memories of the people around him at Antwerp, where there were few Spaniards, except soldiers? And how much less valuable would be any collection made there than one made in Spain?

3. Again, a “Cancionero de Romances” occurs, printed “En Envers en casa de Martin Nucio, MDL.,” a copy of which is in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal of Paris. It has the same Preface with the one last mentioned, from which it differs only in omitting seven of its ballads, and inserting thirty-seven others. The errors noted in the one without date, at folios 272. b, etc., are corrected in this one, dated 1550, and prove it to be the subsequent edition of the two,—a fact necessarily inferred, also, from the additions it contains.

4. This edition of 1550 seems to have been issued with different title-pages, for Wolf says there is a copy of it in the Imperial Library at Vienna, dated 1554. But nearly all the copies now known to exist bear the date of 1555, under which this collection is best known, and is commonly cited. It is absolutely the same work with the copy at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, dated 1550, ballad for ballad, and page for page; and as there is no appearance that the title-page of the copy at the Arsenal has been tampered with, we are to suppose that three editions of the collection of ballads made at Saragossa in 1550 appeared in the course of that year; two of which were published by Martin Nucio, at Antwerp. That all three are only one work is apparent from the circumstance, that their ballads are generally the same, and that they have the same Preface, a little changed in the second and third editions to meet the changes in the ballads contained in them. They are all in 18mo. The first, taking both its parts together, fills four hundred and thirty-six leaves; the second, two hundred and seventy-six; and the third, three hundred. Several reprints of the last are given by Wolf; namely, Antwerp, 1568 and 1573; Lisbon, 1581; and Barcelona, 1587 and 1626.

Subsequent to the Silva of Saragossa, we have several collections of ballads, that are noticed in the text,—such as those of Sepulveda, 1551, Timoneda, 1573, Linares, 1573, Padilla, 1583, Maldonado, 1586, and Cueva, 1587,—consisting chiefly or entirely of ballads written by their respective authors. At last, an attempt was made to gather another Romancero from all the sources, whether of books, memory, or tradition, that were open to its collectors,—the true principle on which the popular Spanish Romanceros have always been compiled. It seems to have been begun at Valencia, when the first volume of the “Flor de Varios y Nuevos Romances, Primera y Segunda Parte,” collected by Andrés de Villalta, with a Third Part by Felipe Mey,—himself a poet and scholar as well as a printer,[458]—were printed in one volume, in 1593, though each of them had, probably, been printed earlier by itself. It is cited by Duran (Romances Caballarescos, Madrid, 1832, 12mo, Tom. I., Advertencia); and from the ballads he took out of it there can be no doubt, that its three parts differed little from the first three parts of the “Romancero General” printed somewhat later. The second volume of this collection, which is entitled “Quarta y Quinta Parte de Flor de Romances,” was collected by Sebastian Velez de Guevara, Racionero de la Colegial de Santander, and was printed at Burgos, in 1594, 18mo, one hundred and ninety-one leaves. It is apparently not the first edition, for the Aprobacion by Pedro de Padilla, and a permission to print it, are dated 1592, while the permission to print the present edition is dated August 11, 1594, and says it has been “otras veces impreso.” Probably the two parts were originally printed separately.

The third volume, and the most important, is entitled “Sexta Parte de Flor de Romances Nuevos, recopilados de muchos Autores, por Pedro de Flores, Librero,” and was printed at Toledo, in 1594, 18mo, one hundred and ninety leaves. It is the first edition, but the license seems to speak of a fourth and fifth part as if also made by Flores. In a ballad prefixed to this third volume, Flores is accused before Apollo of having taken great pains to collect its contents.

to which, in a defence immediately following, Flores replies, that “they were stray ballads [romances que andavan descarriados], which he had brought together with great labor,” and for which the god proceeds to reward rather than to punish him. Flores adds, that he gives each ballad complete, and not like the street-singers, who drawl out one half, and then say they are tired of it. The whole account shows that many of the ballads in this Sixth Part—which is excellent and contains a hundred and fifty-eight—were collected from the memories of the people by Pedro Flores himself.

The fourth volume contains “Septima y Octava Parte de Flor de Varios Romances Nuevos, recopilados de muchos Autores”; printed by Juan Iñiguez de Lequerica, Alcalá de Henares, 1597, 18mo. There is a license for each part; that of the first dated May 4, 1596, and recognizing it as a reprint, and that of the second dated September 30, 1597, as if it were the original edition, and entitling it “Flores del Parnaso, Octava Parte.” The Seventh Part fills one hundred and sixty-eight leaves, and the Eighth one hundred and thirty-two leaves, numbered separately.

The fifth and last volume is called “Flor de Varios Romances diferentes de todos impresos, Novena Parte,” printed by Juan Flamenco, Madrid, 1597, 18mo, one hundred and forty-four leaves. The Aprobacion, 4th September, 1597, and the Tassa, 22d March, 1596, speak of it as the eighth and ninth parts; but the license, without date, is only for Part Ninth.

5. From these nine parts was made, with slight changes and additions, chiefly toward the end, the first edition of the “Romancero General,” which was printed at Madrid, 1600, 4to; the Tassa being dated 16th December, 1599. A copy of it is in the National Library at Madrid. A new edition—again with slight changes—appeared in 1602; and another in 1604. This last was reprinted, without alteration, by Juan de la Cuesta, at Madrid, in 1614. But Miguel de Madrigal had previously published the “Segunda Parte del Romancero General y Flor de diversa Poesía,” (Valladolid, 1605, 4to,) which may appropriately be added to either of the last two editions of the principal work; and thus, from nine parts, of which all four of the editions otherwise consist, extend them to thirteen parts. All these editions are in small quarto, and constitute the well-known “Romanceros Generales.”

The publication of so many different collections of ballads, in the last half of the sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth, leaves no doubt that ballads had then become known in all classes of society, and were gradually finding favor with the highest. But the Romanceros Generales were too large for popular use. Smaller ballad-books, therefore, were printed; such as the “Jardin de Amadores,” by Juan de la Puente, 1611; the “Primavera” of Pedro Arias Perez, made with much judgment, and printed in 1626, 1659, etc.; the “Maravillas del Parnaso” of Jorge Pinto de Morales, 1640; the “Romances Varios” of Pablo de Val, 1655; and several others, to say nothing of the many still less considerable collections, making only a sheet or two, which are noticed by Depping and Wolf, and which were published to meet the broad demands of the less cultivated portions of the Spanish people, just as they have been published and republished down to our own times. For similar reasons, though, perhaps, more to gratify the military taste of the age, and afford amusement to the armies in Flanders, Italy, and the Indies, selections were made from the Romanceros Generales, and contributions obtained from other sources, to make smaller and more convenient ballad-books of a stirring nature. Such is the “Floresta de Romances de los Doce Pares de Francia,” by Damian Lopez de Tortajada, the first edition of which was printed at Alcalá in 1608, (Don Quixote, ed. Pellicer, 1797, 8vo, Tom. I. p. 105,) and such is the “Romancero del Cid,” by Juan de Escobar, first printed at Alcalá in 1612 (Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 684); both of which have often been reprinted since.

But towards the end of the seventeenth century, a love for the old Spanish ballads, as well as for the rest of the elder national literature, began to decay in the more favored classes of society; and, with the coming in of the eighteenth century and the Bourbon family, it disappeared almost entirely. So strong a feeling, however, and one that had struck its roots so deeply in the popular character, could not be extirpated. The ballads were forgotten and neglected by the courtly and the noble, but that the mass of the nation was as faithful to them as ever we have the plain testimony of Sarmiento, and the fact, that they were constantly reprinted for popular use in the humblest forms,—most frequently in what are called broadsides. At last, an attempt was made to replace them on their old ground. Fernandez, in 1796, printed two volumes of them in his collection of Castilian poetry, and Quintana made a small, but dainty, bouquet of them for his lyrical extracts in 1807, adding to each publication a Preface, which gave them praise high and graceful, if not such as seemed to be imbued with their own earnest spirit. Little effect, however, was yet produced at home, but some was soon apparent abroad. Jacob Grimm published at Vienna, in 1815, a small collection of the best old ballads, chiefly taken from the Romancero of 1555; and C. B. Depping published at Leipzig, in 1817, a larger one, containing above three hundred ballads, with a Preface and notes in German, the whole of which was republished in Spanish, first, with slight additions and corrections, at London, in 1825, by V. Salvá, and secondly, with very large and important additions, at Leipzig, by Depping himself and by A. A. Galiano, in 1844;—publications of great merit, which have done more than all that had been done previously to make the old Spanish ballads known in Europe generally, and which have apparently called forth the admirably spirited translations of ballads by J. G. Lockhart, 1823, and the interesting historically-arranged French versions in prose of nearly three hundred, by Damas Hinard, 1844.

A very important publication of Spanish ballads in later times comes, however, as it should come, from Spain itself, and was made by Don Agustin Duran, to whom early Spanish literature, in other respects, owes much. He began, in 1828, with the Moorish ballads in the Romancero General of 1614, and went on, in 1829, with two volumes of miscellaneous ballads, ending his labors, in 1832, with two volumes more, containing historical ballads and ballads of chivalry;—in all, five volumes,—the last four of which are collected from all the sources he could command earlier than the middle of the seventeenth century, and the whole of which, with additions, have been republished at Paris by Ochoa, in 1838, and at Barcelona by Pons, in 1840.

Still, a general, thorough, and critical collection of Spanish ballads is wanting;—one embracing those of the known authors, like Cueva, Padilla, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and Góngora, as well as the untold wealth that remains, and must always remain, anonymous in the elder Romanceros. When we possess such a work, and not before, we can understand and honor, as they deserve to be understood and honored, the poetry and the nationality of the old Spanish ballads, upon which, as upon its true foundations, rests the old Spanish drama. But to whom shall we look for it? Is it to Duran at Madrid, or to Wolf at Vienna, or to Huber at Berlin? I have intimations that one may be expected from Duran, and hope they may soon be fulfilled.

APPENDIX, C.

ON FERNAN GOMEZ DE CIBDAREAL AND THE “CENTON EPISTOLARIO.”

(See Vol. I. p. 398.)

I have treated the “Centon Epistolario” in the text just as it has heretofore been treated; that is, as a collection of the unstudied letters of a simple-hearted, vain man, who, for above forty years, was attached to the person of John the Second, and familiar with what was done at his court. Still, the exactness and genuineness of the work have not been entirely unquestioned. Mayans y Siscar (in his Orígenes, Tom. I., 1737, p. 203) speaks of Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga, (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 500, Vol. III. p. 184,) the well-known author and diplomatist of the time of Philip the Fourth, sometimes called Vera y Figueroa, and says, “Feamente adulteró las epístolas históricas del Bachiller Fernan Gomez de Ciudad Real,”—He shamefully adulterated the historical letters of the Bachelor Ferdinand Gomez de Cibdareal; but Mayans gives no reasons or facts to support this severe charge, and he is roundly rebuked for it by Diosdado, (in his treatise “De Primâ Typographiæ Hispanicæ Ætate,” Romæ, 1794, p. 74,) who calls it “an atrocious calumny.” And again, Quintana, in his Life of Alvaro de Luna, (Vidas de Españoles Célebres, Tom. III., 1833, p. 248, note,) is so much troubled about some of the discrepancies between the Bachelor’s accounts of the death of the Constable and the known facts of history, that he, too, suggests all sorts of doubts, but ends by saying that he follows the Bachelor’s accounts as a sufficient authority where they are not directly contradicted by others higher and safer.

My own opinion is, that the book is a forgery from beginning to end; but a forgery so ingenious, so happy, so agreeable, that it may seem an ungracious thing to tell the truth about it, or attempt to disturb the position it has so long held in the Castilian literature of the fifteenth century. The facts on which I ground my opinion are chiefly these:—

1. No such person as the Bachelor Cibdareal is mentioned in the chronicles or correspondence of the period during which he is supposed to have lived, though our accounts from such sources are copious and minute; noticing, I believe, everybody of consequence at the court of John the Second, and certainly many persons of much less importance than the king’s confidential physician.

2. No manuscript of the Letters is known to be in existence.

3. The first notice of them is, that they appear in an edition in small quarto, black letter, one hundred and sixty-six pages, which claims to have been printed at Burgos in 1499. Of this edition, few copies have ever been seen. Antonio, who died in 1684, intimates (Bib. Vetus, Tom. II. p. 250) a doubt about the truth of its date; Bayer, in his note on the passage, 1788, says that learned men commonly supposed that Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga, (who died in 1658,) published this edition; and Mendez (in his Typographia, 1796, pp. 291 and 293) declares the edition to be unquestionably half a century later than its pretended date;—all three of these learned men being experts and good witnesses concerning a fact, which, I think, must be obvious to any person familiar with the earliest printed Spanish books, who should look on a copy of it now before me. The name of the printer on its title-page, Juan de Rei, it is important to add, is otherwise suspected.

4. The next edition of the Letters of Cibdareal is that of Madrid, 1775, edited by Don Eugenio Llaguno y Amirola, Secretary of the Academy of History, who thinks the first edition could not have been printed till after 1600;—a circumstance otherwise probable, as I am not aware that it is cited by any author of an earlier date. Indeed, if Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga had any thing to do with it, we must suppose it to have been printed yet later; for in 1600 that statesman was only about ten years old.

5. The Bachelor Cibdareal gives a date to no one of his letters; but so completely are the facts or hints for them to be detected in the Chronicle of John the Second, that the editor of the Letters in 1775 has been able, by means of that Chronicle, to affix its proper date to every one, I believe, of the hundred and five letters of which the collection consists. This would hardly be possible, if the two works had been written quite independently of each other.

6. The style of the Letters, though certainly adapted with great skill and felicity to its supposed period, is not uniformly true to it, erring on the side of curious archaisms. Sometimes it goes further, and uses words for which no example can be adduced. Thus the use of ca in the sense of than is wholly unjustifiable; and wherever it so occurs in the first edition, it is altered in the edition of 1775 to que, in order to make sense. Other errors more trifling might be noticed; and in the spelling there is a systematical use of c for z in words that never were spelt with a c.

7. The few words in the “Aviso al Letor,” and the still fewer that introduce the verses at the end of the volume, profess to come from the Editor, who, according to Bayer, Mendez, etc., lived after 1600, and should, therefore, have written in the style of the period when Mariana and Cervantes flourished. But he writes exactly in the style of the Letters he edits, which claim to be a century and a half older; and, what is worse, he uses in his own person the ca for que, which, as we have noticed, nobody else ever used, except his Bachelor.

8. All accounts represent Juan de Mena as having died at Torrelaguna in 1456, at the age of forty-five. (Antonio, Bib. Vetus, ed. Bayer, Tom. II. p. 266; and Romero, Epicedio, 1578, f. 486, at the end of Hernan Nuñez, Proverbios.) Now the supposed Cibdareal (Epist. 20) places Juan de Mena, in 1428,—when he was, of course, only seventeen years old,—on the most familiar footing at court, and makes him already historiographer to the king, and far advanced in his principal poem;—a statement the more incredible when we recollect that Romero says expressly, that Mena was twenty-three years old when he first gave himself to “the sweet labor of good learning,”—“al dulce trabajo de aquel buen saber.” See the notice of Juan de Mena, ante, Vol. I. pp. 379-388.

9. The contemptuous account Cibdareal gives of Barrientos is not one which a courtier in his position would be likely to give of a person already of great consequence, and rising fast to the highest places in the government. But, what is more, it is not the true account. He represents that distinguished ecclesiastic, as we have seen, (ante, Vol. I. p. 359,) to have burnt, in a very rash and reckless manner, a large quantity of books, from the library of the Marquis of Villena, sent to him for examination after the death of their owner, because he had been accused, in his lifetime, of studying magic,—Barrientos, as Cibdareal would have us believe, knowing nothing about the contents of the books, which he burnt, at once, only because he would not take the trouble to examine them. Now I happen to possess, in an unpublished manuscript of Barrientos, his own account of this very matter. It is in a learned treatise on Divination, which he wrote by order of John the Second, and addressed to that monarch; and in the Preface to the Second Part of which he declares that he burnt the books in question by the royal order, and intimates, that, in his own opinion, they should have been spared. “And this book,” he says, speaking of the one called “Raziel,” to which I have alluded, (ante, Vol. I, p. 359, note,) “this book is the one, which, after the death of Don Enrique [de Villena], you, as king, commanded me, your servant and creature, to burn, with many others, which I did, in presence of sundry of your servants;—a matter in which, as in many other things, you showed and still show the great devotion your Highness has always had for the Christian religion. And, although this was and is to be praised, still, for other respects, it is good in some way to preserve such books, provided they are in the hands and power of good, trustworthy persons, who will take heed that they be read by none but wise men,” etc.;—a very different account certainly from the one given in the letter of Cibdareal, and one which, being addressed to the king, who was necessarily acquainted with the whole transaction, can hardly have been untrue.

10. The most considerable event recorded in the Letters of Cibdareal, and one of the most considerable occurrences in Spain during the fifteenth century, is the execution of the Constable Alvaro de Luna, at Valladolid, June 2, 1452. The Bachelor says, he was with the king in that city the day it happened and the night preceding; that the king showed great irresolution as to the fulfilment of the sentence up to the last moment; that he had a sorrowful and sleepless night before it occurred; and that nobody dared to tell him the execution was absolutely over till he had eaten his dinner;—adding to these striking statements sundry picturesque local details, as if they had come within his own knowledge by his witnessing the execution. Now the truth is, that the king was not in Valladolid on that day, nor for some days before and after; and it would have been a very hard-hearted thing if he had been there at the moment when his old friend and favorite minister of state, to whom he never ceased to be attached, was brought to the scaffold, in order to satisfy the turbulent nobility whom he had oppressed. The king was, in fact, then at the siege of Maqueda, a little town northwest of Toledo, above eighty miles off, as appears by his letters still extant, dated May 29, June 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.; so that many of the circumstances recorded in Cibdareal’s letter (the 103d) are necessarily untrue. Moreover, the supposed Cibdareal places the execution of the Constable on the eve of Saint Mary Magdalen,—“Víspera de la Magdalena,”—confounding it with the date of the death of the king, which happened on that day the next year, and thus placing it on the 21st of July, which was the eve of Saint Mary Magdalen, instead of the 2d of June, which, after some discussion, long since the time when these Letters were first printed, has been determined to be the true day of the execution. This gross mistake in the Letters about the date of the Constable’s death was made, I suppose, in part from carelessness, and in part because that date was not then settled, as it is now. (See Mendez, Typographia, 1796, pp. 256-260; and Quintana, Vidas, Tom. III. pp. 437-439.)

11. The age in which I suppose the Letters of Cibdareal to have been forged was one in which such attempts were likely to be made. It was in Spain an age of forgeries. Guevara had just before maintained his “Marcus Aurelius” to be true history. (See, ante, Vol. I. p. 541.) The “Leaden Books” of Granada, and the “Chronicones” of Father Higuera,—the first decided by the whole civil authority of the realm to be genuine, and the second received as such by a very general consent,—were, from 1595 to 1652, at the height of their success, though both have long since been admitted to be gross frauds, which acute scholars like Montano, and historians like Mariana, must, indeed, have seen through, and were too high-minded to countenance; but which, it should be remembered, they did not feel strong enough openly to resist and denounce. In this state of opinion in Spain, some ingenious scholar—perhaps Vera y Zuñiga—as clear-sighted as they were and only a little less scrupulous, may well have been encouraged to imitate Father Higuera in a matter which, instead of being an attempt, like his, to bring false records concerning important affairs into the history of the kingdom, may have been regarded merely as a literary jeu d’esprit, intended to mislead nobody on any point except merely that of the genuineness of the correspondence. (See, ante, Vol. III. p. 152, note.)

Against all this may be urged the general simplicity and interesting details of the Letters themselves, so appropriate in their tone to the age they illustrate, and the fact, that for above two centuries they have been cited as the highest authority for the events of which they speak; a fact, however, whose importance is diminished when we recollect how rarely a spirit of criticism has shown itself in Spanish historical literature, and that even in Spanish poetry the case of the Bachiller de la Torre is, in some respects, as strong as that of the Bachiller de Cibdareal, and in others yet stronger. At any rate, all we know with tolerable certainty about the Bachelor Cibdareal is, that the first edition of his Letters is a forgery, intended to conceal something, and more likely, I think, intended to conceal the spuriousness of the whole than any thing else.

APPENDIX, D.

ON THE BUSCAPIÉ.

(See Vol. II. pp. 105, etc.)

A good deal has been said within the last seventy years, and especially of late, (1847-49,) about a pamphlet entitled “El Buscapié,”—“The Squib,” or “Search-foot,”—supposed by some persons to have been written by Cervantes, soon after the publication of the First Part of his Don Quixote. The subject, though not one of great consequence, is certainly not without interest, and the facts in relation to it are, I believe, as follows.

In the Life of Cervantes, by Vicente de los Rios, prefixed to the magnificent edition of the Don Quixote published by the Spanish Academy in 1780, (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 52,) it is stated, that, on the appearance of the First Part of that romance, in 1605, the public having, according to a tradition not, I think, earlier recorded, received it with coldness or censure, the author himself published an anonymous pamphlet, called “The Squib,” in which he gave a pleasant critique on his Don Quixote, insinuating that it was a covert satire on sundry well-known and important personages, without, however, in the slightest degree intimating who those personages were; in consequence of which, the public curiosity became much excited, and the Don Quixote obtained such attention as it needed in order to insure its success. (Tom. I. p. xvii.)

In a note appended (p. cxci.) to this statement of the tradition, we have a letter of Don Antonio Ruydiaz,—a person of whom little or nothing is now known, except that Don Vicente declares him to have been a man of learning worthy of credit,—in which letter, under date of December 16, 1775, Don Antonio asserts, that, about sixteen years earlier, he had seen a copy of the Buscapié at the house of the Count of Salceda, and had read it;—that it was a small anonymous volume, printed at Madrid with a good type and on poor paper;—that it pretended to be written by a person who had neglected to buy or read the Don Quixote for some time after its first appearance, but who, having at last bought and read it, had been filled with admiration at its merits and resolved in consequence to make them known;—that this Buscapié declared the characters in the Don Quixote to be, in the main, imaginary, but yet insinuated that they had certain relations to the designs and gallantries of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and of some of the principal personages in his government;—and that the Count de Salceda being dead, and the copy of the Buscapié in question having been only lent to that nobleman by some person unknown to the writer of the letter, he could give no further account of the matter.

This statement, differing, it will be noted, from the tradition recorded in the text to which it is appended, in what relates to the Emperor Charles the Fifth, was not, on the whole, deemed satisfactory. Pellicer, besides other strong doubts, doubted whether Cervantes wrote the pamphlet, even if all the rest related of it were true, (Don Quixote, ed. 1797, Tom. I. p. xcvii.,) and Navarrete inclined to the opinion, that there was some mistake about the whole affair, and that Cervantes could never have intended to allude to the Emperor in the way intimated (Vida de Cervantes, 1819, § 105, etc.); to which Clemencin has since added the suggestion, that the copy of the Buscapié, alleged to have been seen by Ruydiaz, might have been a forgery cunningly imposed on the Count of Salceda, who was “rich and greedy”—rico y goloso—in such matters (ed. D. Quixote, Tom. IV., 1835, p. 50). Indeed, the intimations concerning Charles the Fifth were so absurd in themselves, and the fact,—unknown when the Academy published their edition of 1780,—that four editions of the First Part of Don Quixote were, within a year from the date of its appearance, demanded in order to satisfy the impatient curiosity of the public, is so decisive of its popular success from the outset, that men were, before long, disposed to believe that there never was a Buscapié written by any body. After a time, therefore, the discussion about it ceased, except among those who were interested in the smallest details of the life of Cervantes.

But in 1847 the whole subject came up afresh. Don Adolfo de Castro, a young Andalusian gentleman, much devoted to researches in early Spanish literature, and the author of several curious historical works, which give proof of his success, declared that he had accidentally found a copy of the Buscapié. In 1848 he published it at Cadiz, in a duodecimo volume, with a body of very learned notes,—the text, in large type, making forty-six pages, and the notes one hundred and eighty-eight pages, which, if printed with the same type, would make above two hundred and fifty.

In the Preface, Don Adolfo declares, that the Buscapié he thus publishes was printed from a manuscript which he had obtained from the library of Don Pascual de Gándara, a lawyer of the city of San Fernando, which library, apparently after the death of its owner, had been brought, less than three months before, to the city of Cadiz, the residence of Don Adolfo, to be publicly sold;—that the title of the manuscript, which purports throughout to be the work of Cervantes, is “The very pleasant little Book, called the Squib, in which, besides its much and excellent Learning, are explained all the hidden and unexplained Matters in the Ingenious Knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by a certain Cervantes de Saavedra”;—that the manuscript in question is not in the handwriting of Cervantes, but, as appears by a memorandum following the title, is a copy made at Madrid, February 27, 1606, for Agostin de Molina, son of Argote de Molina, and that it had subsequently come into the possession of the Duke of Lafões, of the royal family of Braganza;—that it contains no allusion whatever disrespectful to the Emperor Charles the Fifth, for whom, as Don Adolfo believes, Cervantes had a sincere admiration;—that it was, according to the Aprobacion of Gutierre de Cetina, June 27, 1605, and that of Thomas Gracian Dantisco, on the 6th of August following, prepared for the press, but that it was not in fact printed, or it would not have been needful to make a copy of it in manuscript the next year;—and that the true and real object of the Squib was, not to attract attention to the Don Quixote, but to defend that work against many persons accounted learned, who, as Don Adolfo suggests, had attacked it with some severity.

In the Buscapié, which immediately follows these statements, Cervantes represents himself as riding on his mule one day upon the road to Toledo, a little beyond the Puente Toledana, when he sees coming towards him a Bachelor mounted on a sorry hack, that at last falls with him to the ground, in the midst of a contest between the beast and his rider, as to whether they shall go on or no. Cervantes courteously helps the stranger to rise; and then, after a few introductory words, they agree to spend together, under some neighbouring trees, the heat of the day, then fast coming upon them. The Bachelor, a foolish, conceited little fellow, with a very deformed person, produces two books for their common entertainment. The first of them is “The Spiritual Verses of Pedro de Ezinas,” which they both praise, and of whose author Cervantes speaks as of a personal acquaintance. The other is the Don Quixote, which the Bachelor treats very slightingly, and which Cervantes, a little disturbed by such contempt, maintains, in general terms, to be a book of merit, not hinting, however, to the Bachelor that he is its author, and putting his defence on the ground, that it is a well-intended attempt to drive the institution of chivalry from the world.

But the vain, garrulous little Bachelor prefers to talk about himself or to tell stories about his father, and is with difficulty brought back to the Don Quixote, which he then assails as a book absurdly recognizing the existence of knight-errantry at the time it was published, and therefore at the very time when they are talking about it,—a position which Cervantes fully admits and then defends, alleging, in proof of its truth, the examples of Suero de Quiñones and Charles the Fifth; while, on the other side, the Bachelor sets forth, how glad he should be if it were really so, because he would then turn knight himself, and come by a princess and a kingdom as other knights had done before him;—all in a strain as crazy as that of the hero of Cervantes, and sometimes much resembling it. Cervantes replies, maintaining the real, actual existence of knight-errantry in his own time by the examples of Olivier de Lamarche and others, which are as little to the purpose as those of Quiñones and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, already cited by him; and so the discussion goes on, until a scene occurs between the hack of the Bachelor and the mule of Cervantes, not unlike that between Rozinante and the horse-flesh of the Galician carriers, in the fifteenth chapter of the First Part of Don Quixote, and one that ends with the total overthrow and demolition of the Bachelor’s beast. This breaks up the conversation between their two riders, and brings the pamphlet to a conclusion,—Cervantes leaving the unlucky Bachelor to get out of his troubles as best he may.

On closing this gay little trifle, we are at once struck with the circumstance, that the Buscapié we have just read, avowing itself on every page to be the work of Cervantes, and declared never to have been printed till the year 1848, can have nothing at all to do with the anonymous Buscapié of which a printed copy is supposed to have been seen about the year 1759;—in fact, that it involves a formal and complete contradiction of every thing of consequence that was ever said or supposed on the subject, before it appeared. This simplifies the matter very much. It is as if a Buscapié had never before been mentioned, and we are therefore to examine the one now published by Don Adolfo de Castro as if the statement of Los Rios and the letter of Ruydiaz had never appeared.

The next thing that occurs to us is the strangeness of the circumstance, that the copy of such a work, not anonymous, but professing to have been written by the greatest and most popular genius of his nation, should, during two centuries and a half, have attracted nobody’s notice; though, during that time, it must have travelled from Madrid to Lisbon and from Lisbon back again to Spain, and though, during the last seventy years, a Buscapié has been much talked about and eagerly asked for.

Nor is the history of the individual manuscript now printed and offered to us, so far as it professes to have a history, more satisfactory. It claims to have been owned by three persons, and a word must be said about each of them.

First, it is said to have been “copied from another copy in the year 1606, at Madrid, on the 27th of February of the said year, for Señor Agustin de Argote, son of the very noble Señor (may he be in holy glory!) Gonzalo Zatieco de Molina, a knight of Seville.”[459] Now, that Argote Zatieco de Molina, a person I have often had occasion to mention, (see, ante, Vol. I. pp. 74, 75, 77, 117, etc.,) was, as this certificate sets forth, dead in 1606, I have no doubt. A manuscript copy of his well-known hints for the history of Seville, now in the possession of one of my friends, contains notices and documents relating to his life, collected, apparently, by the early copyist, from which we learn that Argote de Molina, by a deed dated July 5, 1597, left to his daughter, two sisters, and a brother the patronage of a chaplaincy he had founded in a chapel prepared by him for his burial-place in the church of Santiago, at Seville;[460] and that in 1600 this chapel was completed, and an inscription placed in it, signifying that it was the burial-place of Argote de Molina, late a chief of the Hermandad, and a Veintequatro, or Regidor, of Seville;[461] from all which, as well as from other grounds, it appears that Argote de Molina died between 1597 and 1600. But why is no son of his mentioned in the deed of 1597, providing for the care of his chapel and the protection of his family burial-place after his own death? This is explained by Ortiz de Zuñiga, the very best authority on such a point, who, when giving an account of Argote de Molina and his manuscripts, some of which Zuñiga had then in his possession, says that Argote de Molina had sons, but that they died before him, and that their loss so embittered the latter part of his life, that his reason was impaired by it.[462] What, then, are we to say about this “Agustin,” for whom Don Adolfo’s copy of the Buscapié is certified to have been made in 1606, after the death of his father, Argote, who died without leaving any son?

The second trace of this manuscript is, that it professes to have been a part of the library of the Duke of Lafões; the inscription to this effect being in Portuguese, and without a date.[463] But is it likely that such a manuscript could have remained in such a position unnoticed? Is it likely that João de Braganza, one of the most cultivated and distinguished men of his time, who was born in 1719, and died in 1806; who was the friend of the Prince de Ligne, of Maria Theresa, and of Frederic the Great; who founded the Academy of Lisbon, and was its head till his death; in whose family lived Correa de Serra, and who every evening collected the chief men of letters of his country in his saloon,—is it likely that a work avowedly by Cervantes, and one concerning which, after 1780, the Spanish Academy had caused much inquiry to be made, should have remained in the library of such a man without attracting, during his long life, either his own notice or that of the scholars by whom he was surrounded? Or, finally, as to the third and last presumed possessor of this manuscript of the Buscapié, is it likely that it would have wandered on without being recognized by any body until it found its obscure way into the collection of an Andalusian advocate,—Don Pascual de Gándara,—and that even he, in the nineteenth century, when Navarrete and Clemencin were keeping alive the discussion of the eighteenth about it, should yet know nothing of its import or pretensions, or, knowing them, should withhold his knowledge from all the world?