el mes de maio
En era de mill e CC ... XLV. anos,"

there being, perhaps, something dropped between the second C and the
X. Peter Abbat, however, has been less fortunate than Turoldus, in
that no one, it seems, has asserted his authorship, though he may have
been the copyist-malefactor of theory. And it may perhaps be added
that if MCCXLV. is the correct date, this would correspond to 1207 of
our chronology, the Spanish mediaeval era starting thirty-eight years
too early.

[Footnote 198: I have not thought it necessary to give an abstract of
the contents of the poem, because Southey's _Chronicle of the Cid_ is
accessible to everybody, and because no wise man will ever attempt to
do over again what Southey has once done.]

[Sidenote: _Other poems._]

The remaining literature before the end of the thirteenth century
(immediately after that date there is a good deal, but most of it is
imitated from France) may be dismissed more briefly. It is not very
bulky, but it is noteworthy that it is collected in a manner by no
means usual at the time, under two known names, those of Gonzalo
Berceo, priest of St Elianus at Callahorra, and of King Alfonso X. For
the Spanish _Alexander_ of Juan Lorenzo Segura, though written before
1300, is clearly but one of the numerous family of the French and
French-Latin _Alexandreids_ and _Romans d'Alixandre_. And certain
poems on Apollonius of Tyre, St Mary of Egypt, and the Three Kings,
while their date is rather uncertain, are also evidently "school
poems" of the same kind.

[Sidenote: _Apollonius and Mary of Egypt._]

The Spanish Apollonius,[199] however, is noteworthy, because it is
written in a form which is also used by Berceo, and which has
sometimes been thought to be spoken of in the poem itself as _nueva
maestria_. This measure is the old fourteener, which struggles to
appear in the _Cid_, regularly divided into hephthemimers, and now
regularly arranged also in mono-rhymed quatrains. The "Life of St Mary
of Egypt,"[200] on the other hand, is in octosyllabic couplets,
treated with the same freedom that we find in contemporary German
handlings of that metre, and varying from five syllables to at least
eleven. The rhymes are good, with very rare lapses into assonance; one
might suspect a pretty close adherence to a probably Provencal
original, and perhaps not a very early date. Ticknor, whose
Protestantism or whose prudery seems to have been shocked by this
"coarse and indece