gentlemen of a lofty courtesy; the Moorish chieftains are not “heathen hounds,” but chivalrous adversaries, to be treated, in defeat, with a certain generosity.  This refinement and magnanimity are akin to that ideality of temper which makes Don Quixote at once so noble and so ridiculous, and which is quite remote from the sincere realism of the British minstrelsy.  In style the Spanish ballads are simple, forcible, and direct, but somewhat monotonous in their facility.  The English and Scotch have a wider range of subject; the best of them have a condensed energy of expression and a depth of tragic feeling which is more potent than the melancholy grace of the Spanish.  Women take a more active part in the former, the Christians of the Peninsula having caught from their Saracen foes a prejudice in favour of womanly seclusion and retirement.  There is also a wilder imagination in Northern balladry; a much larger element of the mythological and supernatural.  Ghosts, demons, fairies, enchanters are rare in the Spanish poems.  Where the marvellous enters into them at all, it is mostly in the shape of saintly miracles.  St. James of Compostella appears on horseback among the Christian hosts battling with the Moors, or even in the army of the Conquistadores in Mexico—­an incident which Macaulay likens to the apparition of the “great twin Brethren” in the Roman battle of Lake Regillus.  The mediaeval Spaniards were possibly to the full as superstitious as their Scottish contemporaries, but their superstitions were the legends of the Catholic Church, not the inherited folklore of Gothic and Celtic heathendom.  I will venture to suggest, as one reason of this difference, the absence of forests in Spain.  The shadowy recesses of northern Europe were the natural haunts of mystery and unearthly terrors.  The old Teutonic forest, the Schwarzwald and the Hartz, were peopled by the popular imagination with were-wolves, spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and all those nameless creatures which Tieck has revived in his “Maehrchen” and Hauptmann in the Rautendelein of his “Versunkene Glocke.”  The treeless plateaus of Spain, and her stony, denuded sierras, all bare and bright under the hot southern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of the mind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and his merry men “all under the greenwood tree.”  And this mention of the bold archer of Sherwood recalls one other difference—­the last that need here be touched upon—­between the ballads of Spain and of England.  Both constitute a body of popular poetry, i.e., of folk poetry.  They recount the doings of the upper classes, princes, nobles, knights, and ladies, as seen from the angle of observation of humble minstrels of low degree.  But the people count for much more in the English poems.  The Spanish are more aristocratic, more public, less domestic, and many of them composed, it is thought, by lordly makers.  This is perhaps, in part, a difference in national character; and, in part, a difference in the conditions under which the social institutions of the two countries were evolved.