the coup d'etat corroborates this conclusion. Nothing could be more just or moderate than his foreign policy; and his speeches, so pat to the prevailing ideas that every one hails them as the best expression of his own notions, prove that he is sailing quietly in the strong current of human events.

These considerations to a considerable extent allay those misgivings which we might otherwise entertain from Louis Napoleon's avowed idola

try of his uncle, and from his own deficiency in strong moral principle. He will give due weight to altered circum stances in his attempt to apply the idee Napoleonienne to France or Europe; and as it is an arrangement of Providence that the truly useful is, in the main, the just and right, we may hope that the strong intellect of Napoleon III. will lead him to results which good men would wish to see accomplished.

AN exact chronological classification of the Spanish ballads, according to the periods in which they were composed, is impossible, as so many of them have descended to us by oral tradition (attended with all the changes incidental to such a mode of transmission) from an age which, as far as they are concerned, supplies us with no direct evidence. Their surprising number, however, surpassing not only the similar productions of any other people, but of all the European nations combined, rendered some arrangement necessary; and this has been generally done by classifying them according to their subjects, and in the order of the events which they describe, when the events themselves can be arranged in any chronological sequence. In the historical ballads this, of course, can be done with comparative ease, and, in fact, is done with admirable effect, as far as Spanish history itself is concerned. In the ballads relating to it, we have an almost connected rhythmical narrative of the principal public events which occurred in Spain from the days of King Wamba, down to the reign of Philip IV. This mode of classification has its advantages, and would be valuable, even if an absolutely certain distribution of another kind were possible. To the general reader it presents the most agreeable and the most instructive arrangement. But the spirit of critical investigation was not so easily satisfied. If the exact truth was not attainable, some approximation to it by means of a careful philo

logical and philosophical analysis was possible; which, however, could only be satisfactorily made by a native scholar, full of enthusiasm for his task, and devoting a life to its completion-one to whom not only the broad distinctions of age, of locality, and of dialect, would be visible, but whose practised eye and ear would be able to detect minute shades and half-audible differences that must totally escape the most indefatigable foreign explorer. Such an investigator, fortunately for Spanish letters, has been found in the person of Don Augustin Duran, who may not inappropriately be called the Percy of Spain. He, indeed, has not been the first to draw the attention of his countrymen and the world to the untold wealth of the old Romanceros. In point of fact and of time, he has been the last; but he has succeeded in identi fying his name with the ballad poetry of his country more completely than any of his predecessors in Spain, in consequence of his longer and more persevering application to the subject. He has supplied a desideratum long felt, not only in the Peninsula, but in Germany, in France, in America, and in England-in every country, in fact, where a love of the old Castilian literature was at all diffused, namely, a full but discriminating collection (or selection from all available sources) of the best ballads, from the earliest times down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, whether anonymous or otherwise, accompanied by notes and illustrations of an historical, a critical,

and a philological character. After several previous experiments of separate portions, this work was eventually published in a complete form at Madrid, in the years 1849 and 1851, in two well-printed volumes, imperial octavo, with double columns. They contain upwards of thirteen hundred pages, and nearly two thousand ballads, strictly so called, without the intermixture of any poems, whether of a devotional character, or in a mere lyrical form-two important classes which, being extremely numerous, are reserved for separate collections, perhaps of a nearly equal size. To the portions of his work previously published, Senor Duran prefixed a discourse which will be of much use to us in our subsequent investigations; but to this completed Romancero he has added an appendix, which throws considerable light on the history of the ballad, regarded from a literary and philological point of view. As this subject has not been treated with the fulness which we think it merits, even in the professed histories of Spanish literature, we have thought it right to devote some time to its investigation, and to offer some observations upon it, derived from the valuable essay of Senor Duran, which, we believe, has never appeared but in a Spanish dress.

It is impossible to fix the precise time at which Castilian poetry adopted the form of the ballad, as the fact is unestablished by any historical document. The oldest manuscripts that have been discovered, preserve compositions (such as the Poema del Cid) of a complicated kind, which presuppose a certain degree of art and labour in their production; but there has not been discovered among them one single genuinely popular ballad anterior to the discovery of printing; indeed, until the beginning of the second decade of the sixteenth century, no ballad of the genuinely primitive class is to be found either in manuscript or in print, since those that remain from the latter years of the preceding century belong to the poets by profession, or to the courtly troubadours. In the "Cancionero General," printed at Valencia in 1511, appears for the first time a very limited number of the old popular ballads, till then preserved by tradition, but only intended to serve as texts for the glosses or variations which were made of them by the artistic poets

of the court of John II., or of the Catholic kings.

Nothwithstanding this failure of historical evidence, it is only reasonable to suppose that Castilian poetry, par excellence, in the form of the ballad, ought to have preceded, among the people, that more erudite and learned kind composed in long verses, which were imitated either from the Latins or the Provençals, because nature precedes art-spontaniety comes before effort and memory anticipates writing when applied to the rude productions of the vulgar. The measure of the redondilla or octosyllabic verse, is the first we would expect to meet among the inartificial versifiers of Spain, because it derives its origin more easily than any other from the peculiar construction and harmonious constitution of the Spanish language, and from the rotundity of its periods. The metrical combination of the ballad is likewise very favourable for improvisation, because of its resemblance to the prose of common life, the simplicity of its metre, its pauses and musical monotony, which facilitate a continuous rhyme, and give leisure for the arrange ment of ideas, its natural aptitude for the narration of historical events considered objectively, and for preserving them in the memory-all indicate that the ballad was, or ought to have been, the first musical and poetical breathing exhaled by a people necessitated to preserve their history, their records, their impressions, by means of oral tradition, whilst ignorant of the arts of reading and of writing; and having no resource but in memory, rendered more tenacious by the assistance of measure, cadence, and song, but simple and inartificial, such as might be supplied by a language so informal, and in an age so near to its primitive formation. And what else, indeed, was it possible for a people to do, when the few among them who could read or write disdained to use, for literary purposes, the spoken language of their illiterate countrymen? The popular songs did not penetrate to the palace of the kings, or to the cabinets of the learned, who, doubtless, would have thought themselves degraded if they cast even the slightest glance of approval at the rude productions of nature. Instead of these, the proud and lettered cultivators of a borrowed and an affected science would abandon the sponta

neous inspirations of genius, flying from them like the capricious florist who, instead of cultivating perfumed natural flowers, would prefer to produce artificial ones- beautiful if you will, but wanting the sweet odour and the attractive freshness of nature.

The popular poetry was born solely of its own vigour, and by the necessity that gave it birth. It grew up among the illiterate vulgar, the child of their intelligence, and adapted to them. It preserved itself as if by instinct, without art and in spite of art, until finally it penetrated and invaded it in such a manner that conquered Art at length placed its indelible seal upon it, and was compelled to work for it, to culti vate it, and to take it for its type. Then it was that the artistic poets, having made themselves popular, released the people from the duty of preserving their own peculiar property, which before was a matter of necessity, and the artificial and learned poetry was seen to descend from its throne, to ally itself, and to be amalgamated with that which it previously despised.

Although to the preservation of the popular poetry, writing, for many ages, refused its assistance, memory, as we have already said, preserved it by transmitting it from mouth to mouth, if not in the primitive purity in which it originated, at the worst with those variations (more of form perhaps than of substance) which language undergoes when it is not reduced to writing. From which it follows, that the traditional ballads have suffered those verbal alterations which are inherent to such a mode of transmission, and that it may be affirmed that in no case have they descended to us in all their original purity. As the strolling minstrels and more modern ballad-singers preserved the traditional composition, it is reasonable to suppose that they changed the old words, as they became obsolete, for others that were more intelligible to their cotemporaries. It may also be inferred that they introduced into their songs some new ideas, some thoughts and characteristic traits peculiar to their own epoch, but separated very slightly from the ancient types in the first place, because ideas, thoughts, and customs alter more slowly than the words of a language which is still in process of formation; and secondly, because, in reproducing works already made and

preserved by tradition, the copy departs with difficulty from the original, at least to any very considerable degree.

If then, relying on these arguments, we admit the hypothesis, that the ro mance or ballad was the first form in which the popular Castilian poetry appeared, it may be inferred that it is as ancient as the time in which the rude language of the people began to be systematised, and to appear distinct from the corrupted Latin which produced it. In the most ancient written documents which exist in the Spanish idiom - that is to say, in the "Poem of the Cid," in the General Chroniele of Spain," compiled by order of King Don Alphonso the Wise, in the old "Chronicle of the Cid," and in some others—many and multiplied fragments of ballads are found intermixed; but in these there was an attempt to reduce them to another kind of metre different from that in which they were composed, or to transform them into prose, breaking sometimes their rhythm, but more frequently writing them out in a continuous line, as if they were prose, careless about concealing the rhyme, which is still preserved. If this were not accidental, and it could scarcely be so from the frequency with which it is repeated, it must be admitted that the ballads thus introduced are of a date anterior to the poems and chronicles which contain them; and granting that the documents referred to are the oldest that were written in the vulgar language, the fragments of ballads which they contain must belong to times long preceding those in which these documents were compiled, or may be perhaps cotemporaneous with the historical events to which they refer, or the offspring of other songs still more ancient, which served them as an original. In this last case they must necessarily have undergone some changes, but to a less considerable extent than those later ones which have been preserved by oral tradition alone. In every point of view, therefore, it appears certain that these fragments are anterior to the works in which they appear, which, taking them from tradition, reduced them for the first time to writing-an event which happened, according to the best authorities, before the middle of the twelfth century, that is to say, when already there ex

isted a document written in the vulgar tongue, but whose versification was in a great degree imitated from the elassical language that preceded it; and as in this also are met vestiges of distinct romances, and as it is unreasonable to suppose that in the antecedent ages the people were destitute both of poesy and poets, a new presumption arises, that the ballad preceded the other forms of songs which were more difficult and artificial, and which were reduced to writing in preference to those of the vulgar.

"It is a subject of regret," says Senor Duran, in continuation, "that facts of such interest and importance can only be founded on conjecture; but since no more can be effected, we must of necessity be content with that until indeed other investigators, more indefatigable and more fortunate, may be able, with documents at present unknown, either to confirm or to destroy the hypothesis which is here put forward."

We have already said that it is impossible to fix the time in which the old traditional ballads of Spain commenced, but we may be certain that they ceased to be produced about the end of the first half of the sixteenth century; until then we have no evidence of any having been written except the few which, through accident, either as the text of glosses, or as themes for imitation, were included in the "Cancionero General." At the time stated collections of some of them began to be made on loose sheets or flying leaves, which circulated among the common people, as do now those of the blind ballad-singers, who have thus inherited the profession of the ancient juglares, or minstrels. Thus was there being formed and disseminated a treasury of poesy, in which was found a multitude of ballads collected from tradition, but not so pure as to be free from the variations incidental to the manner in which they were preserved by the people and the ballad-singers, but also from those which it pleased the editors to introduce under the pretext of modernising and correcting them. It may, then, be presumed and received as certain that from the traditional epoch no ballads have come down to us in the exact state in which they were composed, but each one, nevertheless, preserves its originality in an infinite number of

fragments, which have suffered no change.

The popular poesy being despised by the troubadours, it was entrusted only to memory, the people being neither rich enough to preserve it in costly manuscripts, nor even if they were, would it have been of any use to them, since, rude and uncultivated, they were ignorant of the arts of reading and of writing. They contented themselves then by hearing their beloved ballads recited by their singers and wandering minstrels in the market places and at the public festivals, in exchange for the trifling gratuity which was presented to them by their poor auditory. But as even in the sixteenth century printing had already diminished to a considerable extent the cost of producing copies, and reduced it to a sum little more or less than they were in the habit of giving the ballad-singer for his recitations, and as owing to the same cause a love of reading had been excited, the booksellers made, as a subject of profit and of gain, the printing of everything that could feed this new taste; and it was no little matter to offer it multiplied editions of the ballads and other vulgar poesies which the people enjoyed and could procure at so small a price. Thus it may be observed that not only the broad sheets, those first essays of printed popular poetry, but also the copious and cheap collections of the same class which were published about the middle of the sixteenth century, were speculations of the booksellers, rather than works which had their origin in a disinterested love of the subject. It was not so in the preceding ages, and particularly in the fifteenth century, when kings, princes, and noblemen, through a genuine affection for learning, caused expensive manuscripts to be written, containing the most celebrated works of troubadours and learned men, employing therein the hands of the most skilful scribes. It was not so much the excessive cost of the productions just mentioned that alone kept them at a distance from the people; what also contributed to the estrangement was, that the poetry which they contained was not adapted to their uncultivated intelligencethat it was, in fact, an exotic, whose foreign fruit seemed strange and unattractive beside the indigenous productions of the country, being an impor

tation of the affected style and metaphysical subtlety of the Provencal troubadours. The "Cancionero General," when printed in 1511, as it contained almost exclusively poems of an artificial kind, was only sought for in the beginning by the more educated classes, although afterwards a great number of the poems which it contained became popular, and were reproduced, along with others, in various subsequent editions of the "Cancionero," expurgated of some coarseness that defiled the original, down to the year 1573, when it was printed for the last time. This "Cancionero" preserves the artificial poetry of the troubadours of the fifteenth century, as the earlier one of Baena, which remained in MS. down to the year 1851, when it was first published, does a considerable portion of the age preceding. The latter "Cancionero,' or songbook, does not contain a single ballad, and the former so small a number that they occupy but a few pages all which proves that not even the form of such compositions was accepted by the affected troubadours down to the last quarter of the fifteenth century, except perhaps in some of the cantigas of Alfonso the Wise, in which a tendency to the ballad form is perceptible. The portion then of the popular and traditional poetry which remains to us, and which without them would have been for ever lost, we owe to the editors of those separate flying leaves, or broad sheets, and to the collectors who compiled the "Cancionero," and the various "Silvas," "Florestas," and other fancifully styled collections of ballads: The booksellers then of Burgos, of Valladolid, of Seville, and of Granada, may be considered as the preservers of the old Spanish popular poetry; but it is not to be supposed that all the poems contained in the broad sheets and larger collections just referred to belong exclusively to the traditional poesy of the people, some of the more artistic and cultivated class, which had become popular, were also introduced; neither is it to be presumed that the ballads themselves, which are published therein, and which harmonised better with the national taste, have been preserved genuinely, as in their original state, inartificial as they appear since, as we have osaid, all those that were transmitted by the professional ballad-singers have » 10 porsional sılı böliqğın qois

been recomposed, altered, and reformed, by men who were occupied in that pursuit, and who made a liveli hood of singing and reciting them to the people; from which have arisen the various readings that are to be met with in the different editions that have come down to us.

These introductory observations having been made, it remains for us to classify the ballads conformably to their essential and particular character, according to the epochs to which they belong or are supposed to belong, and to the different transformations which they experienced from their first epic and purely objective breathings to the lyrical perfection which they acquired in passing from the rude and general inspiration of the vulgar to that of the strolling minstrels who recited them, and then to the refined and artistic troubadours and poets, who received the ballad still rough and lowly, and who eventually raised it to its highest point of elevation.

The ballads, considered in this point of view, may be divided into the eight following classes :

The first, second, and third belong to the traditional epoch, and comprehend those ballads which may be considered either as exact copies, or as copies more or less approximating to their original construction.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth belong to the literary or educated epoch. The seventh and eighth to a period truly artistic and poetic.

We shall now treat of the qualities, character, and essence of each of these classes in their turn; and first of the primitive ballads belonging to the traditional epoch.

BALLADS OF THE FIRST CLASS.-In this class are included the few romances or ballads which may be considered, though doubtfully, as primitive-that is, such as belong to the category of those which, many times decomposed, in their complete forms have served as the texts of other compositions as well in prose as in verse.

Ballads whose originals are lost may also be admitted into this class, since the professional ballad-singers, in spite of their alterations, have preserved to us, in a great degree unchanged, the historical tradition of events, without clothing them in exotic ornaments or colours, which were peculiar to manners and to a civilisa