But in order to pursue the comparison between the romance and lyric poetry of Portugal and of Spain, an intimate acquaintance with the old Portuguese _Cancioneiros geraes_ (general song books), is indispensable. Collections of this kind seem to have appeared as early as the fifteenth century. Writers on literature, however, usually refer to the _Cancioneiro_, which was printed in the year 1516, by Garcia de Resende, a man of talent, who flourished at the courts of John II. and Emanuel the Great.[21] A later collection of the same kind, which was edited by Father Pedro Ribeyro, professor of poetry, in the second half of the sixteenth century, has never yet been printed. The manuscript is dated 1577.[22] According to the statements of writers who seem to have been acquainted with Garcia de Resende’s work, it would appear that this old Portuguese _Cancioneiro_ contains many more poetic names than the better known Spanish collection of the same kind, and that among these names are several writers who lived in the fourteenth century.[23] Here the author of this history of Portuguese literature, who has vainly endeavoured to render himself acquainted with Garcia de Resende’s interesting collection, must deplore that he is now compelled to leave a chasm which cannot be easily filled up; for this certainly is the place in which it would be most proper to endeavour to discover, in those features, which were doubtless common to all, or at least to most of the Portuguese lyric bards of the fifteenth century, the nature of the original difference of Portuguese and Spanish genius. It may, however, be presumed that the Portuguese poets, who were at this period so much more numerous than the Spanish, had advanced no farther than the latter in poetic refinement, for even Bernardim Ribeyro, called the Portuguese Ennius,[24] who lived until the commencement of the sixteenth century, and who is more celebrated than any other poetic writer of the fifteenth century, does not surpass the authors of the old Spanish ballads, in any thing connected with the cultivation of genius and the improvement of poetic language. Thus in all literary probability the Portuguese _Cancioneiro geral_ is merely a companion work to the Spanish collection. But the preponderating number of the poetic writers of Portugal, compared with those of Spain during the fifteenth century, is a circumstance particularly deserving of notice, since it proves that the soil of Portugal was then, as well as at an earlier period, even more fertile than Spain in poetic genius. Still, however, this indicates no peculiarly eminent talent. It is also but fair to observe, lest the superior number of the Portuguese poets, in proportion to the limited extent of their native land, should be too highly estimated, that in the fifteenth century, the Castilian monarchy was not what it now is; for it was bounded on the south by the Moorish kingdom of Granada, and on the east by the Arragonian dominions, where