There are scores of Spanish books which you may read more profitably than Rodríguez de la Cámara’s novels. _El Siervo libre de Amor_ and the _Estoria de los dos amadores, Ardanlier é Liessa_; and better verses than any he ever wrote may be found in the _Cancionero_ of Juan Alfonso de Baena, who formed this _corpus poeticum_ at some date previous to the death of Queen María, Juan II.’s first wife, in 1445. But Rodríguez de la Cámara has the distinction of being the first courtly poet to put his name to a _romance_. One of the three which he signs, and which were first brought to light by Professor Rennert, is a recast of a famous _romance_ on Count Arnaldos. He was not the only court-poet of his time who condescended to write in the popular vein. Two _romances_, one of them bearing the date 1442, are given in the _Cancionero de Stúñiga_ above the name of Carvajal who, as he resided at the court of Alfonso V. of Aragón in Naples, is outside the limits of our jurisdiction. But the best _romances_, the work of anonymous poets disdained by Santillana and more learned writers, will afford matter for another lecture. CHAPTER IV THE _ROMANCERO_ The _Romancero_ has been described, in a phrase attributed to Lope de Vega, as ‘an _Iliad_ without a Homer.’ More prosaically, it is a collection of _romances_; and, before going further, it may be as well to observe that the meaning of the word _romance_ has become much restricted in course of time. Originally used to designate the varieties of speech derived from Latin, it was applied later only to the body of written literature in the different vernaculars of Romania, and then, by another limitation, it was applied solely to poems written in these languages. Lastly, the meaning of the word was still further narrowed in Spanish, and a _romance_ has now come to mean a special form of verse-composition—an epical-lyric poem arranged primarily in lines of sixteen syllables with one assonance sustained throughout. There are occasional variants from the type. Some few _romances_ have a refrain; in some of the oldest _romances_ there is a change of assonance: but the normal form of the genuine popular _romances_ is what I have just described it to be. There should be no mistake on this point, and yet a mistake may easily be made. Though the metrical structure of these popular Spanish ballads had been demonstrated as far back as 1815 by Grimm in his _Silva de romances viejos_, so good a scholar as Agustín Durán—to whom we owe the largest existing collection of _romances_—has printed them in such a shape as to give the impression that they were written in octosyllabics of which only the even lines (2, 4, 6, 8, etc.) are assonanced. Moreover, he expounds this theory in his _Discurso preliminar_, and his view is supported by the high authority of Wolf.[6] Still, it cannot be maintained. It is undoubtedly true that the later artistic ballads of the sixteenth