n the second
place, if the Chronicles were compiled from ballads, we do not know
that these ballads, as pieces of finished literature and apart from
their subjects, were anything at all like the ballads that we possess.
This last consideration--an uncomfortable one, but one which the
critic is bound to urge--at once disposes of, or reduces to a minimum,
the value of the much-vaunted testimony of a Latin poem, said to date
before the middle of the eleventh century, that "Roderic, called _Mio
Cid_," was sung about. No doubt he was; and no doubt, as the
expression _Mio Cid_ is not a translation from the Arabic, but a quite
evidently genuine vernacularity, he was sung of in those terms. But
the testimony leaves us as much in doubt as ever about the age of the
_existing_ Cid ballads. And if this be the case about the Cid ballads,
the subject of which did not die till hard upon the opening of the
twelfth century itself, or about those concerning the Infantes of
Lara, how much more must it be so with those that deal with such
subjects as Bernardo del Carpio and the Charlemagne invasion, three
hundred years earlier, when it is tolerably certain that there was
nothing at all resembling what we now call Spanish? It seems sometimes
to be thought that the antiquity of the subject of a ballad comports
in some strange fashion the antiquity of the ballad itself; than which
nothing can be much more disputable. Indeed the very metre of the
ballads themselves--which, though simple, is by no means of a very
primitive character, and represents the "rubbing down" of popular
dialect and unscholarly prosody for a long time against the regular
structure of Latin--disproves the extreme earliness of the poems in
anything like their present form. The comparatively uncouth, though
not lawless metres of early Teutonic poetry are in themselves warrants
of their antiquity: the regularity, not strait-laced but unmistakable,
of the Spanish ballads is at least a strong suggestion that they are
not very early.

[Sidenote: _The_ Poema del Cid.]

At any rate there is no sort of proof that they _are_ early; and in
this history it has been made a rule to demand proof, or at least the
very strongest probability. If there be any force in the argument at
the end of the last paragraph, it tells (unless, indeed, the latest
critical hypothesis be adopted, of which more presently) as much in
favour of the antiquity of the _Poema del Cid_ as it tells against
that