Note 139 — Chapter XXXVI
Reading edition
The story of Narvaez, who is honorably noticed in Pulgar’s “Claros Varones,” Título XVII., and who is said to have been the ancestor of Narvaez, the minister of state to Isabella II., is found in Argote de Molina (Nobleza, 1588, f. 296); in Conde (Historia, Tom. III. p. 262); in Villegas (Inventario, 1565, f. 94); in Padilla (Romancero, 1583, ff. 117-127); in Lope de Vega (Remedio de la Desdicha; Comedias, Tom. XIII., 1620); in Don Quixote (Parte I. c. 5), etc. I think, too, that it may have been given by Timoneda, under the title of “Historia del Enamorado Moro Abindarraez,” sine anno, (Fuster, Bib., Tom. I. p. 162,) and it is certainly among the ballads in his “Rosa Española,” 1573. (See Wolf’s reprint, 1846, p. 107.) It is the subject, also, of a long poem by Francisco Balbi de Corregio, 1593. (Depping’s Romancero, Leipsique, 1844, 12mo, Tom. II. p. 231.) That Montemayor took his version of the story of Narvaez from Villegas nobody will doubt who compares both together and remembers that it does not appear in the first edition of the “Diana”; that it is wholly unsuited to its place in such a romance; and that the difference between the two is only that the story, as told by Montemayor, in the “Diana,” Book IV., though it is often, for several sentences together, in the same words with the story in Villegas, is made a good deal longer by mere verbiage. See, ante, Chap. XXXIII., note.
In the “Nobiliario” of Ferant de Mexia, (Sevilla, 1492, folio,)—a curious book, written with Castilian dignity of style, and full of the feudal spirit of an age that believed in the inherent qualities of noble blood,—its author (Lib. II. c. 15) boasts that Narvaez was the brother of his grandfather, calling him “cavallero de los bienaventurados que ovo en nuestros tiempos desde el Cid acá batalloso é victorioso.”