than of intimacy. There was never any such inrush
of foreign domination from this quarter as from Italy in the sixteenth
century, or from France in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and latter half of
the seventeenth.

The unequalled wealth of Spanish literature in popular ballads is
partially explained by the facility with which such things were composed.
The Spanish ballad, or _romance_, was a stanza (_redondilla_, roundel) of
four eight-syllable lines with a prevailing trachaic movement--just the
metre, in short, of "Locksley Hall." Only the second and fourth lines
rimed, and the rime was merely assonant or vowel rime. Given the subject
and the lyrical impulse, and verses of this sort could be produced to
order and in infinite number by poets of the humblest capacity. The
subjects were furnished mainly by Spanish history and legend, the
exploits of national heroes like the Cid (Ruy Diaz de Bivar), the seven
Princes of Lara, Don Fernan Gonzalez, and Bernaldo del Carpio, the leader
in the Spanish versions of the great fight by Fontarabbia

"When Rowland brave and Olivier,
And every paladin and peer
On Roncesvalles died."

Southey thought the Spanish ballads much inferior to the English and
Scotch, a judgment to which students of Spanish poetry will perhaps
hardly agree.[8] The Spanish ballads, like the British, are partly
historical and legendary, partly entirely romantic or fictitious. They
record not only the age-long wars against the Saracen, the common enemy,
but the internecine feuds of the Spanish Christian kingdoms, the quarrels
between the kings and their vassals, and many a dark tale of domestic
treachery or violence. In these respects their resemblance to the
English and Scotch border ballads is obvious; and it has been pointed out
that they sprang from similar conditions, a frontier war for national
independence, maintained for centuries against a stubborn foe. The
traditions concerning Wallace and the Bruce have some analogy with the
chronicles of the Cid; but as to the border fights celebrated in Scott's
"Minstrelsy," they were between peoples of the same race, tongue, and
faith; and were but petty squabbles in comparison with that epic crusade
in which the remnants of the old Gothic conquerors slowly made head
against, and finally overthrew and expelled, an Oriental religion, a
foreign blood, and a civilisation in many respects more brilliant than
anything which Europe could show. The contrast