of the ballads. This piece, which has come down to us in a
mutilated condition, though it does not seem likely that its present
length (3744 lines) has been very greatly affected by the mutilations,
has been regarded as dating not earlier than the middle of the twelfth
or later than the middle of the thirteenth century--that is to say, in
the first case, within a lifetime of the events it professes to deal
with; in the second, at scarcely more than two lifetimes from them.
The historical personality of Ruy Diaz de Bivar, el Cid Campeador
(?1040-1099), does not concern us, though it is perfectly well
established in general by the testimony of his enemies, as well as by
that of his countrymen, and is indeed almost unique in history as that
of a national hero at once of history and of romance. The Roderic who
regained what a Roderic had lost may have been--must have been,
indeed--presented with many facts and achievements which he never
performed, and there may be no small admixture of these in the _Poema_
itself; but that does not matter at all to literature. It would not,
strictly speaking, matter to literature if he had never existed. But
not every one can live up to this severe standard in things literary;
and it is undoubtedly a comfort to the natural man to know that the
Cid certainly did exist, and that, to all but certainty, his blood
runs in the veins of the Queen of England and of the Emperor of
Austria, not to mention the King of Spain, to-day.

[Sidenote: _A Spanish_ chanson de geste.]

But in the criticism of his poetical history this is in strictness
irrelevant. It is unlucky for that criticism that Southey and
Ticknor--the two best critics, not merely in English but in any
language, who have dealt with Spanish literature--were quite
unacquainted with the French _chansons de geste_; while of late,
discussion of the _Poema_, as of other early Spanish literature, has
been chiefly abandoned to philologists. No one familiar with these
_chansons_ (the greatest and oldest of which, the _Chanson de Roland_,
was to all but a certainty in existence when Ruy Diaz was in his
cradle, and a hundred years before the _Poema_ was written) can fail
to see in a moment that this latter is itself a _chanson de geste_. It
was written much nearer to the facts than any one of its French
analogues, except those of the Crusading cycle, and it therefore had
at least the chance of sticking much closer to those facts. Nor is
there mu