ch doubt that it does. We may give up as many as we please of
its details; we may even, if, not pleasing, we choose to obey the
historians, give up that famous and delightful episode of the Counts
of Carrion, which indeed is not so much an episode as the main subject
of the greater part of the poem. But--partly because of its nearness
to the subject, partly because of the more intense national belief in
the hero, most of all, perhaps, because the countrymen of Cervantes
already possessed that faculty of individual, not merely of typical,
characterisation which has been, as a rule, denied to the countrymen
of Corneille--the poem is far more _alive_ than the not less heroic
histories of Roncesvaux or of Aliscans. Even in the _Nibelungenlied_,
to which it has been so often compared, the men (not the women--there
the Teutonic genius bears its usual bell) are, with the exception,
perhaps, of Hagen, shadowy, compared not merely to Rodrigo himself,
but to Bermuez and Muno Gustioz, to Asur Gonzalez and Minaya.

[Sidenote: _In scheme and spirit._]

Still the _chanson_ stamp is unmistakably on it from the very
beginning, where the Cid, like three-fourths of the _chanson_ heroes
themselves, has experienced royal ingratitude, through the vaunts and
the fighting, and the stock phrases (_abaxan las lanzas_ following
_abrazan los escudos_, and the like), to that second marriage
connecting the Cid afresh with royalty, which is almost as common in
the _chansons_ as the initial ingratitude. It would be altogether
astonishing if the _chansons_ had not made their way, when French
literature was making it everywhere, into the country nearest to
France. In face of the _Poema del Cid_, it is quite certain that they
had done so, and that here as elsewhere French literature performed
its vigorous, and in a way self-sacrificing, function of teaching
other nations to do better than their teacher.

[Sidenote: _Difficulties of its prosody._]

When we pass from comparisons of general scheme and spirit to those of
metrical form, the matter presents greater puzzles. As observed above,
the earliest French _chansons_ known to us are written in a strict
syllabic metre, with a regular caesura, and arranged in distinct though
not uniformly long _laisses_, each tipped with an identical
assonance. Further, it so happens that this very assonance is one of
the best known characteristics of Spanish poetry, which is the only
body of verse except old French t