The unequalled wealth of Spanish literature in popular ballads is partially explained by the facility with which such things were composed.  The Spanish ballad, or romance, was a stanza (redondilla, roundel) of four eight-syllable lines with a prevailing trachaic movement—­just the metre, in short, of “Locksley Hall.”  Only the second and fourth lines rimed, and the rime was merely assonant or vowel rime.  Given the subject and the lyrical impulse, and verses of this sort could be produced to order and in infinite number by poets of the humblest capacity.  The subjects were furnished mainly by Spanish history and legend, the exploits of national heroes like the Cid (Ruy Diaz de Bivar), the seven Princes of Lara, Don Fernan Gonzalez, and Bernaldo del Carpio, the leader in the Spanish versions of the great fight by Fontarabbia

  “When Rowland brave and Olivier,
  And every paladin and peer
  On Roncesvalles died.”

Southey thought the Spanish ballads much inferior to the English and Scotch, a judgment to which students of Spanish poetry will perhaps hardly agree.[8] The Spanish ballads, like the British, are partly historical and legendary, partly entirely romantic or fictitious.  They record not only the age-long wars against the Saracen, the common enemy, but the internecine feuds of the Spanish Christian kingdoms, the quarrels between the kings and their vassals, and many a dark tale of domestic treachery or violence.  In these respects their resemblance to the English and Scotch border ballads is obvious; and it has been pointed out that they sprang from similar conditions, a frontier war for national independence, maintained for centuries against a stubborn foe.  The traditions concerning Wallace and the Bruce have some analogy with the chronicles of the Cid; but as to the border fights celebrated in Scott’s “Minstrelsy,” they were between peoples of the same race, tongue, and faith; and were but petty squabbles in comparison with that epic crusade in which the remnants of the old Gothic conquerors slowly made head against, and finally overthrew and expelled, an Oriental religion, a foreign blood, and a civilisation in many respects more brilliant than anything which Europe could show.  The contrast between Castile and Granada is more picturesque than the difference between Lothian and Northumberland.  The Spanish ballads have the advantage, then, of being connected with imposing passages of history.  In spirit they are intensely national.  Three motives animate them all:  loyalty to the king, devotion to the cross, and the pundonor:  that sensitive personal honour—­the “Castilian pride” of “Hernani,”—­which sometimes ran into fantastic excess.  A rude chivalry occasionally softens the ferocity of feudal manners in Northern ballad-poetry, as in the speech of Percy over the dead Douglas in “Chevy Chase.”  But in the Spanish romances the knightly feeling is all-pervading.  The warriors are hidalgos,