e
"Romancero." Of late years versions in increasing numbers of Spanish
poetry of all kinds, ancient and modern, by Ormsby, Gibson, and others
too numerous to name, have made the literature of the country largely
accessible to English readers. But to Lockhart belongs the credit of
having established for the English public the convention of romantic
Spain--the Spain of lattice and guitar, of mantilla and castanet,
articles now long at home in the property room of romance, along with the
gondola of Venice, the "clock-face" troubadour, and the castle on the
Rhine. The Spanish brand of mediaevalism would seem, for a number of
years, to have substituted itself in England for the German, and
doubtless a search through the annuals and gift books and fashionable
fiction and minor poetry generally, of the years from 1825 to 1840, would
disclose a decided Castilian colouring. To such effect, at least, is the
testimony of the Edinburgh reviewer--from whom I have several times
quoted--reviewing in January, 1841, the new and sumptuously illustrated
edition of "Ancient Spanish Ballads." "Mr. Lockhart's success," he
writes, "rendered the subject fashionable; we have, however, no space to
bestow on the minor fry who dabbled in these . . . fountains. Those who
remember their number may possibly deprecate our re-opening the
floodgates of the happily subsided inundation."

The popular ballad, indeed, is, next after the historical romance, the
literary form to which the romantic movement has given, in the highest
degree, a renewal of prosperous life. Every one has written ballads, and
the "burden" has become a burden even as the grasshopper is such. The
very parodists have taken the matter in hand. The only Calverley made
excellent sport of the particular variety cultivated by Jean Ingelow.
And Sir Frederick Pollock, as though actuated by Lowell's hint, about "a
declaration of love under the forms of a declaration in trover," cast the
law reports into ballad phrase in his "Leading Cases Done into English
(1876):

"It was Thomas Newman and five his feres
(Three more would have made them nine),
And they entered into John Vaux's house,
That had the Queen's Head to sign.
The birds on the bough sing loud and sing low,
What trespass shall be _ab initio_."

Of course the great majority of these poems in the ballad form, whether
lyric or narrative, or a mixture of both, are in no sense romantic. They
are like Wordsworth's