The Gallegans have been a poetic people from the very earliest times, and this fact tallies with the traditions of their Celtic origin. Like the Irish, they have preserved even to our own day the Celtic predilection for spontaneous wit. The poetical contests indulged in by the _trovadores_ of the Middle Ages were only an elaboration of the Celtic contests of wit so popular among the ancient Irish, and which are still part of the programme connected with a Gallegan peasant’s wedding. On the eve of her wedding-day the peasant girl in Galicia hears before her window the witty and often sarcastic couplet flung by the friends of a disappointed rival at the successful suitor and his friends who have come to serenade her, and then, as quickly as an echo, it is answered by the triumphant couplet of the happy bridegroom. Verse comes as readily as prose to the lips of these people, and the peasant bride may listen half through the night to their poetic banter.[74] Where the disappointment of the rival is very great, not only is the sentiment confessed in his spontaneous couplets very bitter, it is sometimes even cruel. French critics in Feijoó’s day complained that Italian and Spanish poets put too much enthusiasm (poetic frenzy) into their poetry, and to this charge Feijoó replied that he who wishes to turn the poets into prudent, discreet, and sensible beings, wishes to do away with them altogether, for enthusiasm is the soul of poetry, the ecstasy of the mind is the wing of the pen. In Galicia it is the wing of the tongue. “_Impetus ille sacer, qui vatum pectora nutrit._” The fact that Portugal and Galicia had for several centuries one common language accounts for the other fact that both have more than once laid claim to the honour of having produced the same great poet or literary man. Hence it comes that the _trovador Macías el Enamorado_ appears as a Portuguese poet in the works of Portuguese writers, and as a Gallegan poet in the works of Spanish writers. The same apparent contradiction occurs with regard to the _Cantigas_ of Alfonso _el Sabio_.[75] Great was the importance of Galicia in the Middle Ages. Constantly was she visited by royalty, by princes, and by the flower of chivalry, attracted to the sepulchre of St. James. The greatest and noblest families of Spain had their senorial estates in Galicia. It was there that they founded the “Order of the Knights of Spain,” and later the _Hermandad de Cambiadores_, institutions which lent their powerful protection to the pilgrims who passed to and from Santiago on the French road (_Camino francés_).