Even more fantastic is the personality of Ruy Diaz as rendered by the anonymous compiler of the _Crónica Rimada_ (Rhymed Chronicle of Events in Spain from the Death of King Pelayo to Ferdinand the Great, and more especially of the Adventures of the Cid). The composition which bears this clumsy and inappropriate title is better named the _Cantar de Rodrigo_, and consists of 1125 lines, preceded by a scrap of rugged prose. Not till after digressions into other episodes, and irrelevant stories of Miro and Bernardo, Bishops of Palencia, probably fellow-townsmen of the compiler, does the Cid appear. He is no longer, as in the _Poema_, a popular hero, idealised from historic report; he is a purely imaginary figure, incrusted with a mass of fables accumulated in course of time. At the age of twelve he slays Gómez Górmaz (an almost impossible style, compounded of a patronymic and the name of a castle belonging to the Cid), is claimed by the dead man's daughter, weds her, vanquishes the Moors, and leads his King's—Fernando's—troops to the gates of Paris, defeating the Count of Savoy upon the road. One legend is heaped upon another, and the poem, the end of which is lost, breaks off with the Pope's request for a year's truce, which Fernando, acting as ever upon the Cid's advice, magnanimously extends for twelve years. It is hard to say whether the _Cantar de Rodrigo_ as we have it is the production of a single composer, or whether it is a patchwork by different hands, arranged from earlier poems, and eked out by prose stories and by oral traditions. The versification is that of the simple sixteen-syllabled line, each hemistich of which forms a typical _romance_ line. This in itself is a sign of its later date, and to this must be added the traces of deliberate imitation of the _Poema_, and the writer's familiarity with such modern devices as heraldic emblems. Further, the use of a Provençal form like _gensor_, the unmistakable tokens of French influence, the anticipation of the metre of the clerkly poems, the writer's frank admission of earlier songs on the same subject, the metamorphosis of the Cid into a feudal baron, and, above all, the decadent spirit of the entire work: these are tokens which imply a relative modernity. Much of the obscurity of language, which has been mistaken for archaism, is simply due to the defects of the manuscript; and the evidence goes to show that the _Rodrigo_, put together in the last decade of the twelfth century or the first of the thirteenth, was retouched in the fourteenth by Spanish _juglares_ humiliated by the recent French invasions. Even so, much of the primitive _pastiche_ remains, and the _Rodrigo_, which is mentioned in the _General Chronicle_, interests us as being the fountain-head of those _romances_ on the Cid whose collection we owe to that enthusiastic and most learned investigator, Madame Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos. Far inferior in merit and interest to the _Poema_, the _Rodrigo_ ranks with