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Only the barest mention need be made of a "clerkly poem" called the Vida de San Ildefonso (Life of St. Ildephonsus), a dry narrative of over a thousand lines, probably written soon after 1313, when the saint's feast was instituted by the Council of Peñafiel. Its author declares that he once held the prebend of Úbeda, and that he had previously rhymed the history of the Magdalen. No other information concerning him exists; nor is it eagerly sought, for the Prebendary's poem is a colourless imitation of Berceo, without Berceo's visitings of inspiration. More merit is shown in the Proverbios en Rimo de Salomón (Solomon's Rhymed Proverbs), moralisings on the vanity of life, written, with many variations, in the manner of Berceo. The author of these didactic, satiric verses is announced in the oldest manuscript copy as one Pero Gómez, son of Juan Fernández. He has been absurdly confounded with an ancient "Gómez, trovador," and, more plausibly, with the Pero Gómez who collaborated with Paredes in translating Brunetto Latini's Tesoro; but the name is too common to allow of precise opinion as to the real author, whom some have taken for Pero López de Ayala. Whoever the writer, he possessed a pleasant gift of satirical observation, and a knowledge of men and affairs which he puts to good use, with few lapses upon the merely trite and banal.

Of more singular interest is the incomplete Poema de José or Historia de Yusuf, named by the writer, Al-hadits de Jusuf. This curious monument, due doubtless to some unconverted Mudéjar of Toledo, is the typical example of the literature called aljamiada. The language is correct Castilian of the time, and the metre, sustained for 312 stanzas, is the right Bercean: the peculiarity lies in the use of Arabic characters in the phonetic transcription. A considerable mass of such compositions has been discovered (and in the discovery England has taken part); but of them all the Historia de Yusuf is at once the best and earliest. It deals with the story of Joseph in Egypt, not according to the Old Testament narrative, but in general conformity with the version found in the eleventh sura of the Ku'rān, though the writer does not hesitate to introduce variants and amplifications of his own invention, as (stanza 31) when the wolf speaks to the patriarch whose son it is supposed to have slain. The persecution of Joseph by Potiphar's wife, who figures as Zulija (Zuleikah), is told with considerable spirit, and the mastery of the cuaderna vía (the Bercean metre of four fourteen-syllabled lines rhymed together) is little short of amazing in a foreigner. At whiles an Arabic word creeps into the text, and the invocation of Allah, with which the poem opens, is repeated in later stanzas; but, taken as a whole, apart from the oriental colouring inseparable from the theme, there is a marked similarity of tone between the Historia de Yusuf and its predecessors the "clerkly poems." An oriental subject handled by an Arab gave the best possible opportunity for introducing orientalism in the treatment; the occasion is eschewed, and the lettered Arab studiously follows in the wake of Berceo and the other Castilian models known to him. There could scarcely be more striking evidence of the irresistible progress of Castilian modes of thought and expression. The Arabic influence, if it ever existed, was already dead.

Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, near Guadalajara, is the greatest name in early Castilian literature. The dates of his birth and death are not known. A line in his Libro de Cantares (stanza 1484) inclines us to believe that, like Cervantes, he was a native of Alcalá de Henares; but Guadalajara also claims him for her own, and a certain Francisco de Torres reports him as living there so late as 1415. This date is incompatible with other ascertained facts in Ruiz' career. We learn from a note at the end of his poems that "this is the book of the Archpriest of Hita, which he wrote, being imprisoned by order of the Cardinal Don Gil, Archbishop of Toledo." Now, Gil Albornoz held the see between the years 1337 and 1367; and another clerk, named Pedro Fernández, was Archpriest of Hita in 1351. Most likely Juan Ruiz was born at the close of the thirteenth century, and died, very possibly in gaol, before his successor was appointed. On the showing of his own writings, Juan Ruiz was a cleric of irregular life at a time when disorder was at its worst, and his thirteen years in prison proclaim him a Goliard of the loosest kind. He testifies against himself with a splendid candour; and yet there have been critics who insisted on idealising this libidinous clerk into a smug Boanerges. There was never a more grotesque travesty, a more purblind misunderstanding of facts and the man.

The Archpriest was a fellow of parts and of infinite fancy. He does, indeed, allege that he supplies, "incentives to good conduct, injunctions towards salvation, to be understanded of the people and to enable folk to guard against the trickeries which some practise in pursuit of foolish loves." He comes pat with a text from Scripture quoted for his own purpose:—"Intellectum tibi dabo, et instruam te in via hac, qua gradieris." He passes from David to Solomon, and, with his tongue in his cheek, transcribes his versicle:—"Initium sapientiæ timor Domini." St. John, Job, Cato, St. Gregory, the Decretals—he calls them all into court to witness his respectable intention, and at a few lines' distance he unmasks in a passage which prudish editors have suppressed:—"Yet, since it is human to sin, if any choose the ways of love (which I do not recommend), the modes thereof are recounted here;" and so forth, in detail the reverse of edifying. Ovid's erotic verses are freely rendered, the Archpriest's unsuccessful battle against love is told, and the liturgy is burlesqued in the procession of "clerks and laymen and monks and nuns and duennas and gleemen to welcome love into Toledo." The attempt to exhibit Ruiz as an edifying citizen is, on the face of it, absurd.

Much that he wrote is lost, but the seventeen hundred stanzas that remain suffice for any reputation. Juan Ruiz strikes the personal note in Castilian literature. To distinguish the works of the clerkly masters, to declare with certainty that this Castilian piece was written by Alfonso and that by Sancho, is a difficult and hazardous matter. Not so with Ruiz. The stamp of his personality is unmistakable in every line. He was bred in the old tradition, and he long abides by the rules of the mester de clerecía; but he handles it with a freedom unknown before, imparts to it a new flexibility, a variety, a speed, a music beyond all precedent, and transfuses it with a humour which anticipates Cervantes. Nay, he does more. In his prose preface he asserts that he chiefly sought to give examples of prosody, of rhyme and composition:—"Dar algunas lecciones, é muestra de versificar, et rimar et trobar." And he followed the bent of his natural genius. He had an infinitely wider culture than any of his predecessors in verse. All that they knew he knew—and more; and he treated them in the true cavalier spirit of the man who feels himself a master. His famous description of the tent of love is manifestly suggested by the description of Alexander's tent in the Libro de Alexandre. The entire episode of Doña Endrina is paraphrased from the Liber de Amore, attributed to the Pseudo-Ovid, the Auvergnat monk who hides beneath the name of Pamphilus Maurilianus.

French fableaux were rifled by Ruiz without a scruple, though he had access to their great originals in the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus; for to his mind the improved treatment was of greater worth than the mere bald story. He was familiar with the Kalilah and Dimnah, with Fadrique's Crafts and Wiles of Women, perhaps with the apologues of Lull and Juan Manuel. Vast as his reading was, it had availed him nothing without his superb temperament, his gift of using it to effect. Vaster still was his knowledge of men, his acquaintance with the seamy side of life, his interest in things common and rare, his observation of manners, and his lyrical endowment. The name of "the Spanish Petronius" has been given to him; yet, despite a superficial resemblance between the two, it is a misnomer. Far nearer the truth, though the Spaniard lacks the dignity of the Englishman, is Ticknor's parallel with Chaucer. Like Chaucer, Ruiz had an almost incomparable gust for life, an immitigable gaiety of spirit, which penetrates his transcription of the Human Comedy. Like Chaucer, his adventurous curiosity led him to burst the bonds of the prison-house and to confer upon his country new rhythms and metres. His four cánticas de serrana, suggested by the Galician makers, anticipate by a hundred years the serranillas and the vaqueiras of Santillana, and entitle him to rank as the first great lyric poet of Castile. Ruiz, likewise, had a Legend of Women; but his reading was his own, and Chaucer's adjective cannot be applied to it. His ambition is, not to idealise, but to realise existence, and he interprets its sensuous animalism in the spirit of picaresque enjoyment. Jewesses, Moorish dancers, the procuress Trota-conventos, her finicking customers, the loose nuns, great ladies, and brawny daughters of the plough—Ruiz renders them with the merciless exactitude of Velázquez.

The arrangement of Ruiz' verse, disorderly as his life, foreshadows the loose construction of the picaresque novel, of which his own work may be considered the first example. One of his greatest discoveries is the rare value of the autobiographic form. Mingled with parodies of hymns, with burlesques of old cantares de gesta, with glorified paraphrases of both Ovids (the true and the false), with versions of oriental fables read in books or gathered from the lips of vagrant Arabs, with peculiar wealth of popular refrains and proverbs—with these goes the tale of the writer's individual life, rich in self-mockery, gross in thought, abundant in incident, splendid in expression, slyly edifying in the moral conclusion which announces an immediate relapse. Poet, novelist, expert in observation, irony, and travesty, Ruiz had, moreover, the sense of style in such measure as none before him and few after him, and to this innate faculty of selection he joined a great capacity for dramatic creation. Hence the impossibility of exhibiting him in elegant extracts, and hence the permanence of his types. The most familiar figure of Lazarillo de Tormes—the starving gentleman—is a lineal descendant of Ruiz' Don Furón, who is scrupulous in observing facts so long as there is nothing to eat; and Ruiz' two lovers, Melón de la Uerta and Endrina de Calatayud, are transferred as Calisto and Melibea to Rojas' tragi-comedy, whence they pass into immortality as Romeo and Juliet. Lastly, Ruiz' repute might be staked upon his fables, which, by their ironic appreciation, their playful wit and humour, seem to proceed from an earlier, ruder, more virile La Fontaine.

Contemporary with Juan Ruiz was the Infante Juan Manuel (1282–1347), grandson of St. Ferdinand and nephew of Alfonso the Learned. In his twelfth year he served against the Moors on the Murcian frontier, became Mayordomo to Fernando IV., and succeeded to the regency shortly after that King's death in 1312. Mariana's denunciation of "him who seemed born solely to wreck the state" fits Juan Manuel so exactly that it is commonly applied to him; but, in truth, its author intended it for another Don Juan (without the "Manuel"), uncle of the boy-king, Alfonso XI. Upon the regency followed a spell of wars, broils, rebellions, assassinations, wherein King and ex-Regent were pitted against each other. Neither King nor soldier bore malice, and the latter shared in the decisive victory of Salado and—perhaps with Chaucer's Gentle Knight—in the siege of Algezir (Algeciras). Fifty years of battle would fill most men's lives; but the love of literature ran in the blood of Juan Manuel's veins, and, like others of his kindred, he proved the truth of the old Castilian adage:—"Lance never blunted pen, nor pen lance."

He set a proper value on himself and his achievement. In the General Introduction to his works he foresees, so he announces, that his books must be often copied, and he knows that this means error:—"as I have seen happen in other copies, either because of the transcriber's dulness, or because the letters are much alike." Wherefore Juan Manuel prepared, so to say, a copyright edition, with a prefatory bibliography, whose deficiencies may be supplemented by a second list given at the beginning of his Conde Lucanor. And he closes his General Introduction with this prayer:—"And I beg all those who may read any of the books I made not to blame me for whatever ill-written thing they find, until they see it in this volume which I myself have arranged." His care seemed excessive: it proved really insufficient, since the complete edition which he left to the monastery at Peñafiel has disappeared. Some of his works are lost to us, as the Book of Chivalry,[4] a treatise dealing with the Engines of War, a Book of Verses, the Art of Poetic Composition (Reglas como se debe Trovar), and the Book of Sages. The loss of the Book of Verses is a real calamity; all the more that it existed at Peñafiel as recently as the time of Argote de Molina (1549–90), who meant to publish it. Juan Manuel's couplets and quatrains of four, eight, eleven, twelve, and fourteen syllables, his arrangement (Enxemplo XVI.) of the octosyllabic redondilla in the Conde Lucanor, prove him an adept in the Galician form, an irreproachable virtuoso in his art. It seems almost certain that his Book of Verses included many remarkable exercises in political satire; and, in any case, his example and position must have greatly influenced the development of the courtly school of poets at Juan II.'s court.

A treatise like his Libro de Caza (Book of Hawking), recently recovered by Professor Baist, needs but to be mentioned to indicate its aim. His histories are mere epitomes of Alfonso's chronicle. The Libro del Caballero et del Escudero (Book of the Knight and Squire), in fifty-one chapters, of which some thirteen are missing, is a didacticism, a fabliella, modelled upon Ramón Lull's Libre del Orde de Cavallería. A hermit who has abandoned war instructs an ambitious squire in the virtues of chivalry, and sends him to court, whence he returns "with much wealth and honour." The inquiry begins anew, and the hermit expounds to his companion the nature of angels, paradise, hell, the heavens, the elements, the art of posing questions, the stuff of the planets, sea, earth, and all that is therein—birds, fish, plants, trees, stones, and metals. In some sort the Tratado sobre las Armas (Treatise on Arms) is a memoir of the writer's house, containing a powerful presentation of the death of Juan Manuel's guardian, King Sancho, passing to eternity beneath his father's curse.

Juan Manuel follows Sancho's example by preparing twenty-six chapters of Castigos (Exhortations), sometimes called the Libro infinido, or Unfinished Book, addressed to his son, a boy of nine. He reproduces Sancho's excellent manner and sound practical advice without the flaunting erudition of his cousin. The Castigos are suspended to supply the monk, Juan Alfonso, with a treatise on the Modes of Love, fifteen in number; being, in fact, an ingenious discussion on friendship. Juan Manuel is seen almost at his best in his Libro de los Estados (Book of States), otherwise the Book of the Infante, and thought by some to be the missing Book of Sages. The allegorical didactic vein is worked to exhaustion in one hundred and fifty chapters, which relate the education of the pagan Morován's son, Johas, by a certain Turín, who, unable to satisfy his pupil, calls to his aid the celebrated preacher Julio. After interminable discussions and resolutions of theological difficulties, the story ends in the baptism of father, son, and tutor. Gayangos gives us the key; Johas is Juan Manuel; Morován is his father, Manuel; Turín is Pero López de Ayala, grandfather of the future Chancellor; and Julio represents St. Dominic (who, as a matter of fact, died before Juan Manuel's father was born). This confused philosophic story, suggestive of the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, is in truth the vehicle for conveying the author's ideas on every sort of question, and it might be described without injustice as the carefully revised commonplace book of an omnivorous reader with a care for form. A postscript to the Book of States is the Book of Preaching Friars, a summary of the Dominican constitution expounded by Julio to his pupil. A very similar dissertation is the Treatise showing that the Blessed Mary is, body and soul, in Paradise, directed to Remón Masquefa, Prior of Peñafiel.

Juan Manuel's masterpiece is the Conde Lucanor (also named the Book of Patronio and the Book of Examples), in four parts, the first of which is divided into fifty-one chapters. Like the Decamerone, like the Canterbury Tales—but with greater directness—the Conde Lucanor is the oriental apologue embellished in terms of the vernacular. The convention of the "moral lesson" is maintained, and each chapter of the First Part (the others are rather unfinished notes) ends with a declaration to the effect that "when Don Johan heard this example he found it good, ordered it to be set down in this book, and added these verses"—the verses being a concise summary of the prose. The Conde Lucanor is the Spanish equivalent of the Arabian Nights, with Patronio in the part of Scheherazade, and Count Lucanor (as who should say Juan Manuel) as the Caliph. Boccaccio used the framework first in Italy, but Juan Manuel was before him by six years, for the Conde Lucanor was written not later than 1342. The examples are taken from experience, and are told with extraordinary narrative skill. Simplicity of theme is matched by simplicity of expression. The story of father and son (Enxemplo II.), of the Dean of Santiago and the Toledan Magician (Enxemplo XI.), of Ferrant González and Nuño Laynez, a model of dramatic presentation (Enxemplo XVI.), are perfect masterpieces in little.

Juan Manuel is an innovator in Castilian prose, as is Juan Ruiz in Castilian verse. He lacks the merriment, the genial wit of the Archpriest; but he has the same gift of irony, with an added note of cutting sarcasm, and a more anxious research for the right word. He never forgets that he has been the Regent of Castile, that he has mingled with kings and queens, that he has cowed emirs and barons, and led his troopers at the charge; and it is well that he never unbends, since his unsmiling patrician humour gives each story a keener point. In mind as in blood he is the great Alfonso's kinsman, and the relation becomes evident in his treatment of the prose sentence. He inherited it with many another splendid tradition, and, while he preserves entire its stately clearness, he polishes to concision; he sets with conscience to the work, sharpening the edges of his instrument, exhibits its possibilities in the way of trenchancy, and puts it to subtler uses than heretofore. In his hands Castilian prose acquires a new ductility and finish, and his subjects are such that dramatists of genius have stooped to borrow from him. In him (Enxemplo XLV.) is the germ of the Taming of the Shrew (though it is scarcely credible that Shakespeare lifted it direct), and from him Calderón takes not merely the title—Count Lucanor—of a play, but the famous apologue in the first act of Life is a Dream, an adaptation to the stage of one of Juan Manuel's best instances (Enxemplo XXXI.). Pilferings by Le Sage are things of course, and Gil Blas benefits by its author's reading. Translations apart—and they are forthcoming—the Conde Lucanor is one of the books of the world, and each reading of it makes more sensible the loss of the verses which, one would fain believe, might place the writer as high among poets as among prose writers.

The Poema de Alfonso Onceno, also known as his Rhymed Chronicle, was unearthed at Granada in 1573 by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and an extract from it, printed fifteen years later by Argote de Molina, encouraged the idea that Alfonso XI. wrote it. That King's sole exploit in literature is a handbook on venery, often attributed to Alfonso the Learned. The fuller, but still incomplete text of the Poema, first published in 1864, discloses (stanza 1841) the author's name as Rodrigo Yañez or Yannes. It is to be noted that he speaks of rendering Merlin's prophecy in the Castilian tongue:—

"Yo Rodrigo Yannes la noté

En lenguaje castellano."

Everything points to his having translated from a Galician original, being himself a Galician who hispaniolised his name of Rodrigo Eannes. Strong arguments in favour of this theory are advanced by great authorities—Professor Cornu, and that most learned lady, Mme. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos. In the first place, the many technical defects of the Poema vanish upon translation into Galician; and next, the verses are laced with allusions to Merlin, which indicate a familiarity with Breton legends, common enough in Galicia and Portugal, but absolutely unknown in Spain. Be that as it prove, the Poema interests as the last expression of the old Castilian epic. Here we have, literally, the swan-song of the man-at-arms, chanting the battles in which he shared, commemorating the names of comrades foremost in the van, reproducing the martial music of the camp juglar, observing the set conventions of the cantares de gesta. His last appearance on any stage is marked by a portent—the suppression of the tedious Alexandrine, and the resolution into two lines of the sixteen-syllabled verse. Yañez is an excellent instance of the third-rate man, the amateur, who embodies, if he does not initiate, a revolution. His own system of octosyllabics in alternate rhymes has a sing-song monotony which wearies by its facile copiousness, and inspiration visits him at rare and distant intervals. But the step that costs is taken, and a place is prepared for the young romance in literature.

No precise information offers concerning Rabbi Sem Tob of Carrión, the first Jew who writes at length in Castilian. His dedication to Pedro the Cruel, who reigned from 1350 to 1369, enables us to fix his date approximately, and to guess that he was, like others of his race, a favourite with that maligned ruler. Written in the early days of the new reign, Sem Tob's Proverbios Morales, consisting of 686 seven-syllabled quatrains, are more than a metrical novelty. His collection of sententious maxims, borrowed mainly from Arabic sources and from the Bible, is the first instance in Castilian of the versified epigram which was to produce the brilliant Proverbs of Santillana, who praises the Rabbi as a writer of "very good things," and reports his esteem as a "grand trovador." In Santillana's hands the maxims are Spanish, are European; in Sem Tob's they are Jewish, oriental. The moral is pressed with insistence, the presentation is haphazard; while the extreme concision of thought, the exaggerated frugality of words, tends to obscurity. Against this is to be set the exalted standard of the teaching, the daring figures of the writer, his happiness of epithet, his note of austere melancholy, and his complete triumph in naturalising a new poetic genre.

It has been sought to father on Sem Tob three other pieces: the Treatise of Doctrine, the Revelation of a Hermit, and the Danza de la Muerte. The Treatise, a catechism in octosyllabic triplets with a four-syllabled line, is by Pedro de Berague, and is only curious for its rhythm, imitated from the rime couée, and for being the first work of its kind. Sem Tob was in his grave when the ancient subject of the Argument between Body and Soul was reintroduced by the maker of the Revelation of a Hermit, wherein the souls are figured as birds, gracious or hideous as the case may be. The third line of this didactic poem gives its date as 1382, and this is confirmed by the evidence of the metre and the presence of an Italian savour. In the case of the anonymous Danza de la Muerte the metre once more fixes the period of composition at about the end of the fourteenth century. Most European literatures possess a Danse Macabré of their own; yet, though the Castilian is probably an imitation of some unrecognised French original, it is the oldest known version of the legend. It is not rash to assume that its immediate occasion was the last terrific outbreak of the Black Death, which lasted from 1394 to 1399. Death bids mankind to his revels, and forces them to join his dance. The form is superficially dramatic, and the thirty-three victims—pope, emperor, cardinal, king, and so forth, a cleric and a layman always alternating—reply to the summons in a series of octaves. Whoever composed the Spanish version, he must be accepted as an expert in the art of morbid allegory. Odd to say, the Catalan Carbonell, constructing his Dance of Death in the sixteenth century, rejects this fine Castilian version for the French of Jean de Limoges, Chancellor of Paris.

A writer who represents the stages of the literary evolution of his age is the long-lived Chancellor, Pero López de Ayala (1332–1407). His career is a veritable romance of feudalism. Living under Alfonso XI., he became the favourite of Pedro the Cruel, whom he deserted at the psychological moment. He chronicles his own and his father's defection in such terms as Pepys or the Vicar of Bray might use:—"They saw that Don Pedro's affairs were all awry, so they resolved to leave him, not intending to return." Pedro the Cruel, Enrique II., Juan I., Enrique III.—Ayala served all four with profit to his pouch, without flagrant treason. Loyalty he held for a vain thing compared with interest; yet he earned his money and his lands in fight. He ever strove to be on the winning side, but luck was hostile when the Black Prince captured him at Nájera (1367), and when he was taken prisoner at Aljubarrota (1385). The fifteen months spent in an iron cage at the castle of Oviedes after the second defeat gave Ayala one of his opportunities. He had wasted no chance in life, nor did he now. It were pleasant to think with Ticknor that some part of Ayala's Rimado de Palacio "was written during his imprisonment in England,"—pleasant, but difficult. To begin with, it is by no means sure that Ayala ever quitted the Peninsula. More than this: though the Rimado de Palacio was composed at intervals, the stages can be dated approximately. The earlier part of the poem contains an allusion to the schism during the pontificate of Urban VI., so that this passage must date from 1378 or afterwards; the reference to the death of the poet's father, Hernán Pérez de Ayala, brings us to the year 1385 or later; and the statement that the schism had lasted twenty-five years fixes the time of composition as 1403.

Rimado de Palacio (Court Rhymes) is a chance title that has attached itself to Ayala's poem without the author's sanction. It gives a false impression of his theme, which is the decadence of his age. Only within narrow limits does Ayala deal with courts and courtiers; he had a wider outlook, and he scourges society at large. What was a jest to Ruiz was a woe to the Chancellor. Ruiz had a natural sympathy for a loose-living cleric; Ayala lashes this sort with a thong steeped in vitriol. The one looks at life as a farce; the other sees it as a tragedy. Where the first finds matter for merriment, the second burns with the white indignation of the just. The deliberate mordancy of Ayala is impartial insomuch as it is universal. Courtiers, statesmen, bishops, lawyers, merchants—he brands them all with corruption, simony, embezzlement, and exposes them as venal sons of Belial. And, like Ruiz, he places himself in the pillory to heighten his effects. He spares not his superstitious belief in omens, dreams, and such-like fooleries; he discovers himself as a grinder of the poor man's face, a libidinous perjurer, a child of perdition.

But not all Ayala's poem is given up to cursing. In his 705th stanza he closes what he calls his sermón with the confession that he had written it, "being sore afflicted by many grievous sorrows," and in the remaining 904 stanzas Ayala breathes a serener air. In both existing codices—that of Campo-Alange and that of the Escorial—this huge postscript follows the Rimado de Palacio with no apparent break of continuity; yet it differs in form and substance from what precedes. The cuaderna vía alone is used in the satiric and autobiographical verses; the later hymns and songs are metrical experiments—echoes of Galician and Provençal measures, redondillas of seven syllables, attempts to raise the Alexandrine from the dead, results derived from Alfonso's Cantigas and Juan Ruiz' loores. In his seventy-third year Ayala was still working upon his Rimado de Palacio. It was too late for him to master the new methods creeping into vogue, and though in the Cancionero de Baena (No. 518) Ayala answers Sánchez Talavera's challenge in the regulation octaves, he harks back to the cuaderna vía of his youth in his paraphrase of St. Gregory's Job. If he be the writer of the Proverbios en Rimo de Salomón—a doubtful point—his preference for the old system is there undisguised. Could that system have been saved, Ayala had saved it: not even he could stay the world from moving.

His prose is at least as distinguished as his verse. A treatise on falconry, rich in rarities of speech, shows the variety of his interests, and his version of Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum illustrium brings him into touch with the conquering Italian influence. His reference to Amadís in the Rimado de Palacio (stanza 162), the first mention of that knight-errantry of Spain, proves acquaintance with new models. Translations of Boëtius and of St. Isidore were pastimes; a partial rendering of Livy, done at the King's command, was of greater value. In person or by proxy, Alfonso the Learned had opened up the land of history; Juan Manuel had summarised his uncle's work; the chronicle of the Moor Rasis, otherwise Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Mūsā, had been translated from the Arabic; the annals of Alfonso XI. and his three immediate predecessors were written by some industrious mediocrity perhaps Fernán Sánchez de Tovar, or Juan Núñez de Villaizán. These are not so much absolute history as the raw material of history. In his Chronicles of the Kings of Castile, Ayala considers the reigns of Pedro the Cruel, Enrique II., Juan I., and Enrique III., in a modern scientific spirit. Songs, legends, idle reports, no longer serve as evidence. Ayala sifts his testimonies, compares, counts, weighs them, checks them by personal knowledge. He borrows Livy's framework, inserting speeches which, if not stenographic reports of what was actually said, are complete illustrations of dramatic motive. He deals with events which he had witnessed: plots which his crafty brain inspired, victories wherein he shared, battles in which he bit the dust. The portraits in his gallery are scarce, but every likeness, is a masterpiece rendered with a few broad strokes. He records with cold-blooded impartiality as a judge; his native austerity, his knowledge of affairs and men, guard him from the temptations of the pleader. With his unnatural neutrality go rare instinct for the essential circumstance, unerring sagacity in the divination and presentment of character, unerring art in preparing climax and catastrophe, and the gift of concise, picturesque phrase. A statesman of genius writing personal history with the candour of Pepys: as such the thrifty Mérimée recognised Ayala, and, in his own confection, so revealed him to the nineteenth century.

Footnote:

[4] The contents of this work are summarised in the author's Book of States (chap. xci.).