oviese buen senor!"

cry the weeping citizens of Burgos, as they speed the exile on his way.

The Poem of the Cid is but a fragment of 3744 lines; written in a
barbarous style, in rugged assonant rhymes, and a rude Alexandrine
measure, but it glows with the pure fire of poetry, and is full of a
noble simplicity and a true epical grandeur, invaluable as a living
picture of the age. The ballads relating to the Cid, of which nearly two
hundred are extant, are greatly inferior in merit, though some of them
are not unworthy to be ranked with the best in this kind. Duran believes
the greater part of them to have been written in the 16th century. A few
betray, not more by the antiquity of their language than by their
natural and simple tone, traces of an earlier age and a freer national
life. They all take great liberties with history, thus belying the
opinion of Sancho Panza that "the ballads are too old to tell lies."
Such of them as are not genuine relics of the 12th century are either
poetical versions of the leading episodes in the hero's life as
contained in the _Chronicle_, that _Chronicle_ itself having been
doubtless composed out of still earlier legends as sung by the wandering
_juglares_, or pure inventions of a later time, owing their inspiration
to the romances of chivalry. In these last the ballad-mongers, not to
let their native hero be outdone by the Amadises, the Esplandians, and
the Felixmartes, engage him in the most extravagant adventures--making
war upon the king of France and upon the emperor, receiving embassies
from the soldan of Persia, bearding the pope at Rome, and performing
other feats not mentioned even in the Poem or the Chronicle. The last
and the worst of the Cid ballads are those which betray by their frigid
conceits and feeble mimicry of the antique the false taste and
essentially unheroic spirit of the age of Philip II. As for the
innumerable other poems, dramas and tales which have been founded on the
legend of the Cid, from the days of Guillen de Castro and Diamante to
those of Quintana and Trueba, they serve merely to prove the abiding
popularity of the national hero in his native land.

The chief sources from which the story of the Cid is to be gathered
are, first, the Latin chronicle discovered by Risco in the convent of
San Isidro at Leon, proved by internal evidence to have been written
before 1258; the _Cronica General_, composed by Alphonso X. in the
second half of the