The numerous _Cancioneros_ from Baena's time to the appearance of the _Romancero General_ (the First Part printed in 1602, with additions in 1604-14; the Second Part issued in 1605) present a vast collection of admirable lyrics, mostly the work of accomplished courtly versifiers. They contain very few examples of anything that can be justly called old popular songs. Alonso de Fuentes published in 1550 his _Libro de los Cuarenta Cantos de Diversas y Peregrinas Historias_, and in the following year was issued Lorenzo de Sepúlveda's selection. Both profess to reproduce the "rusticity" as well as the "tone and metre" of the ancient _romances_; but, in fact, these songs, like those given by Escobar in the _Romancero del Cid_ (1612), are either written by such students as Cesareo, who read up his subject in the chronicles, and imitated the old manner as best he could, or they are due to others who treated the oral traditions and _pliegos sueltos_ (broadsides) of Spain with the same inspired freedom that Burns showed to the local ditties and chapbooks of Scotland. The two oldest _romances_ bearing any author's name are given in Lope de Stúñiga's _Cancionero_, and are the work of Carvajal, a fifteenth-century poet. Others may be of earlier date; but it is impossible to identify them, inasmuch as they have been retouched and polished by singers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If they exist at all—a matter of grave uncertainty—they must be sought in the two Antwerp editions of Martin Nucio's _Cancionero de Romances_ (one undated, the other of 1550), and in Esteban de Nájera's _Silva de Romances_, printed at Zaragoza in 1550. There remains to say a last word on the disputed relation between the early Castilian and French literatures. Like the auctioneer in _Middlemarch_, patriots "talk wild": as Amador de los Ríos in his monumental fragment, and the Comte de Puymaigre in his essays. No fact is better established than the universal vogue of French literature between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, a vogue which lasted till the real supremacy of Dante and Boccaccio and Petrarch was reluctantly acknowledged. It is probable that Frederic Barbarossa wrote in Provençal; his nephew, Frederic II., sedulously aped the Provençal manner in his Italian verses called the _Lodi della donna amata_. Marco Polo, Brunetto Latini, and Mandeville wrote in French for the same reason that almost persuaded Gibbon to write his _History_ in French. The substitution of the Gallic for the Gothic character in the eleventh century advanced one stage further a process begun by the French adventurers who shared in the reconquest.