between Castile and
Granada is more picturesque than the difference between Lothian and
Northumberland. The Spanish ballads have the advantage, then, of being
connected with imposing passages of history. In spirit they are
intensely national. Three motives animate them all: loyalty to the king,
devotion to the cross, and the _pundonor_: that sensitive personal
honour--the "Castilian pride" of "Hernani,"--which sometimes ran into
fantastic excess. A rude chivalry occasionally softens the ferocity of
feudal manners in Northern ballad-poetry, as in the speech of Percy over
the dead Douglas in "Chevy Chase." But in the Spanish _romances_ the
knightly feeling is all-pervading. The warriors are _hidalgos_,
gentlemen of a lofty courtesy; the Moorish chieftains are not "heathen
hounds," but chivalrous adversaries, to be treated, in defeat, with a
certain generosity. This refinement and magnanimity are akin to that
ideality of temper which makes Don Quixote at once so noble and so
ridiculous, and which is quite remote from the sincere realism of the
British minstrelsy. In style the Spanish ballads are simple, forcible,
and direct, but somewhat monotonous in their facility. The English and
Scotch have a wider range of subject; the best of them have a condensed
energy of expression and a depth of tragic feeling which is more potent
than the melancholy grace of the Spanish. Women take a more active part
in the former, the Christians of the Peninsula having caught from their
Saracen foes a prejudice in favour of womanly seclusion and retirement.
There is also a wilder imagination in Northern balladry; a much larger
element of the mythological and supernatural. Ghosts, demons, fairies,
enchanters are rare in the Spanish poems. Where the marvellous enters
into them at all, it is mostly in the shape of saintly miracles. St.
James of Compostella appears on horseback among the Christian hosts
battling with the Moors, or even in the army of the Conquistadores in
Mexico--an incident which Macaulay likens to the apparition of the "great
twin Brethren" in the Roman battle of Lake Regillus. The mediaeval
Spaniards were possibly to the full as superstitious as their Scottish
contemporaries, but their superstitions were the legends of the Catholic
Church, not the inherited folklore of Gothic and Celtic heathendom. I
will venture to suggest, as one reason of this difference, the absence of
forests in Spain. The shadowy recesses of