No precise information offers concerning Rabbi SEM TOB of Carrión, the first Jew who writes at length in Castilian. His dedication to Pedro the Cruel, who reigned from 1350 to 1369, enables us to fix his date approximately, and to guess that he was, like others of his race, a favourite with that maligned ruler. Written in the early days of the new reign, Sem Tob's _Proverbios Morales_, consisting of 686 seven-syllabled quatrains, are more than a metrical novelty. His collection of sententious maxims, borrowed mainly from Arabic sources and from the Bible, is the first instance in Castilian of the versified epigram which was to produce the brilliant _Proverbs_ of Santillana, who praises the Rabbi as a writer of "very good things," and reports his esteem as a "_grand trovador_." In Santillana's hands the maxims are Spanish, are European; in Sem Tob's they are Jewish, oriental. The moral is pressed with insistence, the presentation is haphazard; while the extreme concision of thought, the exaggerated frugality of words, tends to obscurity. Against this is to be set the exalted standard of the teaching, the daring figures of the writer, his happiness of epithet, his note of austere melancholy, and his complete triumph in naturalising a new poetic _genre_. It has been sought to father on Sem Tob three other pieces: the _Treatise of Doctrine_, the _Revelation of a Hermit_, and the _Danza de la Muerte_. The _Treatise_, a catechism in octosyllabic triplets with a four-syllabled line, is by Pedro de Berague, and is only curious for its rhythm, imitated from the _rime couée_, and for being the first work of its kind. Sem Tob was in his grave when the ancient subject of the _Argument between Body and Soul_ was reintroduced by the maker of the _Revelation of a Hermit_, wherein the souls are figured as birds, gracious or hideous as the case may be. The third line of this didactic poem gives its date as 1382, and this is confirmed by the evidence of the metre and the presence of an Italian savour. In the case of the anonymous _Danza de la Muerte_ the metre once more fixes the period of composition at about the end of the fourteenth century. Most European literatures possess a _Danse Macabré_ of their own; yet, though the Castilian is probably an imitation of some unrecognised French original, it is the oldest known version of the legend. It is not rash to assume that its immediate occasion was the last terrific outbreak of the Black Death, which lasted from 1394 to 1399. Death bids mankind to his revels, and forces them to join his dance. The form is superficially dramatic, and the thirty-three victims—pope, emperor, cardinal, king, and so forth, a cleric and a layman always alternating—reply to the summons in a series of octaves. Whoever composed the Spanish version, he must be accepted as an expert in the art of morbid allegory. Odd to say, the Catalan Carbonell, constructing his _Dance of Death_ in the sixteenth century, rejects this fine