Note 9 — Chapter XXXI

The best elegiac poetry in the Spanish language is, perhaps, that in the two divisions of the first eclogue of Garcilasso. Elegies, or mournful poems of any kind, are often called Endechas in Spanish, as Quevedo called his sad amatory poems; but the origin of the word is not settled, nor its meaning quite well defined. Venegas, in a vocabulary of obscure words at the end of his “Agonía del Tránsito de la Muerte,” 1574, p. 370, says he thinks it comes from inde jaces, as if the mourner addressed the dead body. But this is absurd. It may come from the Greek ἕνδεκα, for when the last verse of each stanza contained just eleven syllables, the poem was said to be written in endechas reales. See Covarrubias, and the Academy, ad verbum, who give no opinion.