There is even a breath of the critical spirit wholly absent from all other early mysteries, which accept the miraculous sign of the star with a simple, unquestioning faith. In our play, the first and third Magi wish to observe it another night, while the second King would fain watch it for three entire nights. Lastly, the scale of the _Misterio_ is larger than that of any predecessor; the personages are not huddled upon the scene at once, but appear in appropriate, dramatic order, delivering more elaborate speeches, and expressing at greater length more individual emotions. This fragmentary piece, written in octosyllabics, forms the foundation-stone of the Spanish theatre; and from it are evolved, in due progression, "the light and odour of the flowery and starry _Autos_" which were to enrapture Shelley. Important and venerable as is the _Misterio_, its freer treatment of the liturgy, its effectual blending of realism with devotion, and its swiftness of action are so many arguments against its reputed antiquity. It is still old if we adopt the conclusion that it was written some twenty years before the _Poema del Cid_. This misnamed epic, no unworthy fellow to the _Chanson de Roland_, is the first great monument of Spanish literature. Like the _Misterio de los Reyes Magos_, like so many early pieces, the _Poema del Cid_ reaches us maimed and mutilated. The beginning is lost; a page in the middle, containing some fifty lines following upon verse 2338, has gone astray from our copy; and the end has been retouched by unskilful fingers. The unique manuscript in which the _cantar_ exists belongs to the fourteenth century: so much is now settled after infinite disputes. The original composition is thought to date from about the middle third of the twelfth century (1135-75), some fifty years after the Cid's death at Valencia in 1099. Hence the _Poem of the Cid_ stands almost midway between the _Chanson de Roland_ and the _Niebelungenlied_. Nevertheless, in its surviving shape it is the result of innumerable retouches which amount to botching. Its authorship is more than doubtful, for the Per Abbat who obtrudes in the closing lines is, like the Turoldus of _Roland_, the mere transcriber of an unfaithful copy. Our gratitude to Per Abbat is dashed with regret for his slapdash methods. The assonants are roughly handled, whole phrases are unintelligently repeated, are transferred from one line to another, or are thrust out from the text, and in some cases two lines are crushed into one. The prevailing metre is the Alexandrine or fourteen-syllabled verse, probably adopted in conscious imitation of that Latin chronicle on the conquest of Almería which first reveals the national champion under his popular title— "_Ipse Rodericus, Mio Cid semper vocatus, De quo cantatur, quod ab hostibus haud superatus._"