"_With bucklers braced before their breasts, with lances pointing low, With stooping crests and heads bent down above the saddle-bow, All firm of hand and high of heart they roll upon the foe. And he that in a good hour was born, his clarion voice rings out, And clear above the clang of arms is heard his battle-shout, 'Among them, gentlemen! Strike home for the love of charity! The Champion of Bivar is here—Ruy Diaz—I am he!' Then bearing where Bermuez still maintains unequal fight, Three hundred lances down they come, their pennons flickering white; Down go three hundred Moors to earth, a man to every blow; And, when they wheel, three hundred more, as charging back they go. It was a sight to see the lances rise and fall that day; The shivered shields and riven mail, to see how thick they lay; The pennons that went in snow-white come out a gory red; The horses running riderless, the riders lying dead; While Moors call on Muhammad, and 'St. James!' the Christians cry._" Indubitably this (and it were easy to match it elsewhere in the _Poema_) is the work of an original genius who redeems his superficial borrowings of incident from _Roland_ by a treatment all his own. That he knew the French models is evident from his skilful conveyance of the bear episode in _Ider_ to his own pages, where the Cid encounters the beast as a lion. But the language shows no hint of French influence, and both thought and expression are profoundly national. The poet's name is irrecoverable, but the internal evidence points strongly to the conclusion that he came from the neighbourhood of Medina Celi. The surmise that he was an Asturian rests solely upon the absence of the diphthong _ue_ from his lines, an inference on the face of it unwarrantable. Against this is the topographical minuteness with which the poet reports the sallies of the Cid in the districts of Castejón and Alcocer; his marked ignorance of the country round Zaragoza and Valencia, his detailed description of the central episode—the outrage upon the Cid's daughters in the wood of Corpes, near Berlanga; and the important fact that the four chief itineraries in the _Poema_ are charged with minutiæ from Molina to San Esteban de Gormaz, while they grow vague and more confused as they extend towards Burgos and Valencia. The most probable conjecture, then, is that the unknown maker of this primitive masterpiece came from the Valle de Arbujuelo; and it is worth adding that this opinion is supported by the authority of Sr. Menéndez Pidal. Perhaps the greatest testimony to the early poet's worth is to be found in this: that his conception of his hero has outlived the true historic Cid, and has forced the child of his imagination upon the acceptance of mankind.