With these last came the French _jongleurs_ to teach the Spaniards the gentle art of making the _chanson de geste_. The very phrase, _cantar de gesta_, bespeaks its French source. As the root of the Cid epic lies in _Roland_, so the _Mystery of the Magian Kings_ is but an offshoot of the Cluny Liturgy. The earliest mention of the Cid, in the Latin _Chronicle of Almería_, joins the national hero, significantly enough, with those two unexampled paragons of France, Oliver and Roland. Another French touch appears in the _Poem of Fernán González_, where the writer speaks of Charlemagne's defeat at Roncesvalles, and laments that the battle was not an encounter with the Moors, in which Bernaldo del Carpio might have scattered them. But we are not left to conjecture and inference; the presence of French _jongleurs_ is attested by irrefragable evidence.[1] Sancho I. of Portugal had at court a French _jongleur_ who in name, if in nothing else, somewhat resembled Guy de Maupassant's creation, "Bon Amis." It is not proved that Sordello ever reached Spain; but, in the true manner of your bullying parasite, he denounces St. Ferdinand as one who "should eat for two, since he rules two kingdoms, and is unfit to govern one":— "_E lo Reis castelás tanh qu'en manje per dos, Quar dos regismes ten, ni per l'un non es pros._" Sordello, indeed, in an earlier couplet denounces St. Louis of France as "a fool"; but Sordello is a mere bilk and blackmailer with the gift of song. Among French minstrels traversing Spain are Père Vidal, who vaunts the largesse of Alfonso VIII., and Guirauld de Calanson, who lickspittles the name of Pedro II. of Aragón. Upon them followed Guilhem Azémar, a _déclassé_ noble, who sank to earning his bread as a common _jongleur_, and later on there comes a crowd of singing-quacks and booth-spouters. It is usual to lay stress upon the influx of French among the pilgrims of the Milky Way on the road to the shrine of the national St. James at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia; and it is a fact that the first to give us a record of this pious journey is Aimeric Picaud in the twelfth century, who unkindly remarks of the Basques, that "when they eat, you would take them for hogs, and when they speak, for dogs." This vogue was still undiminished three hundred years later when our own William Wey (once Fellow of Eton, and afterwards, as it seems, an Augustinian monk at Edyngdon Monastery in Wiltshire) wrote his _Itinerary_ (1456). But though the pilgrimage to Santiago is noted as a peculiarly "French devotion" by Lope de Vega in his _Francesilla_ (1620), it is by no means clear that the French pilgrims outnumbered those of other nations. Even if they did, this would not explain the literary predominance of France. This is not to be accounted for by the scampering flight of a horde of illiterate fakirs anxious only to save their souls and reach their homes: it is rather the natural result