It is beyond question that there once existed _cantares_ (though we cannot fix their date) in honour of Bernaldo de Carpio, of Fernán González, and of the Infantes de Lara; the point as regards the Infantes de Lara is proved to demonstration in the masterly study of D. Ramón Menéndez Pidal. The assonants of the original songs are found preserved in the chronicles, and no one with the most rudimentary idea of the conditions of Spanish prose-composition (whence assonants are banned with extreme severity) can suppose that any Spaniard could write a page of assonants in a fit of absent-mindedness. Two considerable _cantares de gesta_ of the Cid survive as fragments, and they owe their lives to a happy accident—the accident of being written down. They must have had fellows, but probably not an immense number of them, as in France. If the formal _cantar de gesta_ died young, its spirit lived triumphantly in the set chronicle and in the brief _romance_. In the chronicle the author aims at closer exactitude and finer detail, in the _romance_ at swifter movement and at greater picturesqueness of artistic incident. The term _romanz_ or _romance_, first of all limited to any work written in the vernacular, is used in that sense by the earliest of all known troubadours, Count William of Poitiers. In the thirteenth century, _romanz_ or _romance_ acquires a fresh meaning in Spain, begins to be used as an equivalent for _cantar_, and ends by supplanting the word completely. Hence, by slow degrees, _romance_ comes to have its present value, and is applied to a lyrico-narrative poem in eight-syllabled assonants. The Spanish _Romancero_ is, beyond all cavil, the richest mine of ballad poetry in the world, and it was once common to declare that it embodied the oldest known examples of Castilian verse. As the assertion is still made from time to time, it becomes necessary to say that it is unfounded. It is true that the rude _cantar_ was never forgotten in Spain, and that its persistence partly explains the survival of assonance in Castilian long after its abandonment by the rest of Europe. In his historic letter to Dom Pedro, Constable of Portugal, the Marqués de Santillana speaks with a student's contempt of singers who, "against all order, rule, and rhythm, invent these _romances_ and _cantares_ wherein common lewd fellows do take delight." But no specimens of the primitive age remain, and no existing _romance_ is older than Santillana's own fifteenth century.