guages was delayed in the Romance-speaking
countries by the fact that everybody of any education at all had Latin
ready to his hands. And the exceptional circumstances of Spain,
which, after hardly settling down under the Visigothic conquest, was
whelmed afresh by the Moorish invasion, have not been excessively
insisted upon by the authorities who have dealt with the subject. But
still it cannot but strike us as peculiar that the document--the
famous Charter of Aviles,[194] which plays in the history of Spanish
something like the same part which the Eulalia hymn and the Strasburg
Oaths play in French--dates only from the middle of the twelfth
century, more than three hundred years after the Strasburg
interchange, and at a time when French was not merely a regularly
constituted language, but already had no inconsiderable literature. It
is true that the Aviles document is not quite so jargonish as the
Strasburg, but the same mark--the presence of undigested
Latin--appears in both.

[Footnote 194: Extracts of this appear in Ticknor, Appendix A., iii.
352, note.]

It is, however, fair to remember that prose is almost invariably later
than poetry, and that official prose of all periods has a tendency to
the barbarous. If the Aviles charter be genuine, and of its assigned
date, it does not follow that at the very same time poetry of a much
less uncouth character was not being composed in Spanish. And as a
matter of fact we have, independently of the ballads, the great _Poema
del Cid_, which has sometimes been supposed to be of antiquity equal
to this, and which can hardly be more than some fifty years later.

[Sidenote: _Ballads?_]

As to the ballads, what has been said about those in Portuguese must
be repeated at somewhat greater length. There is no doubt at all that
these ballads (which are well known even to English readers by the
masterly paraphrases of Lockhart) are among the finest of their kind.
They rank with, and perhaps above, the best of the Scottish poems of
the same class. But we have practically, it would seem, no earlier
authority for them than the great _Cancioneros_ of the sixteenth
century. It is, of course, said that the _Cronica General_ (see
_post_), which is three centuries earlier, was in part compiled from
these ballads. But, in the first place, we do not know that this was
the fact, or that the ballads were not compiled from the Chronicles,
or from traditions which the Chronicles embodied. And i