But if Spain, unlike Italy, has no authentic poems in an intermediate tongue, proofs of French influence are not lacking in her earliest movements. Two of the most ancient Castilian lyrics—_Razón feita d'Amor_ and the _Disputa del Alma_—are mere liftings from the French; the _Book of Apolonius_ teems with Provençalisms, and the poem called the _History of St. Mary of Egypt_ is so gallicised in idiom that Milá y Fontanals, a ripe scholar and a true-blue Spaniard, was half inclined to think it one of those intermediary productions which are sought in vain. At every point proofs of French guidance confront us. Anxious to buffet and outrage his father's old _trovador_, Pero da Ponte, Alfonso the Learned taunts him with illiteracy, seeing that he does not compose in the Provençal vein:— "_Vos non trovades como proençal._" And, for our purpose, we are justified in appealing to Portugal for testimony, remembering always that Portugal exaggerates the condition of things in Spain. King Diniz, Alfonso the Learned's nephew, plainly indicates his model when in the Vatican _Cancioneiro_ (No. 123) he declares that he "would fain make a love-song in the Provençal manner":— "_Quer' eu, en maneyra de proençal, Fazer agora um cantar d'amor._" And Alfonso's own _Cantigas_, honeycombed with Gallicisms, are frankly Provençal in their wonderful variety of metre. Nor should we suppose that the Provençaux fought the battle alone: the northern _trouvères_ bore their part. The French school, then, is strong in Spain, omnipotent in Portugal, and, were the Spanish _Cancioneros_ as old as the Portuguese Song-book in the Vatican, we should probably find that the foreign influence was but a few degrees less marked in the one country than in the other. As it is, Alfonso the Learned ranks with any Portuguese of them all; and it is reasonable to think that he had fellows whose achievement and names have not reached us. For Spanish literature and ourselves the loss is grave; and yet we cannot conceive that there existed in early Castilian any examples comparable in elaborate lyrical beauty to the _cantars d'amigo_ which the Galician-Portuguese singers borrowed from the French _ballettes_. In the first place, if they had existed, it is next to incredible that no example and no tradition of them should survive. Next, the idea is intrinsically improbable, since the Castilian language was not yet sufficiently ductile for the purpose. Moreover, from the outset there is a counter-current in Castile. The early Spanish legends are mostly concerned with Spanish subjects. Apart from obvious foreign touches in the early recensions of the story of Bernaldo de Carpio (who figures as Charlemagne's nephew), the tone of the ballads is hostile to the French, and, as is natural, the enmity grows more pronounced with time. That national hero, the Cid, is especially anti-French. He casts the King of France in gaol; he throws away the French King's chair with insult in St. Peter's.