[169] Dominacion de los Árabes, Tom. I., Prólogo, pp. xviii.-xix., p. 169, and other places. But in a manuscript preface to a collection which he called “Poesías Orientales traducidas por Jos. Ant. Conde,” and which he never published, he expresses himself yet more positively: “In the versification of our Castilian ballads and _seguidillas_, we have received from the Arabs _an exact type_ of their verses.” And again he says, “From the period of the infancy of our poetry, we have rhymed verses according to _the measures used by the Arabs before the times of the Koran_.” This is the work, I suppose, to which Blanco White alludes (Variedades, Tom. II. pp. 45, 46). The theory of Conde has been often approved. See Retrospective Review, Tom. IV. p. 31, the Spanish translation of Bouterwek, Tom. I. p. 164, etc. But though, from the air of historical pretension with which it presents itself, there is something in this theory that bespeaks our favor, yet there are strong reasons that forbid our assent to it. For the earliest of the Spanish ballads, concerning which alone the question can arise, have not at all the characteristics of an imitated literature. Not a single Arabic original has been found for any one of them; nor, so far as we know, has a single passage of Arabic poetry, or a single phrase from any Arabic writer, entered directly into their composition. On the contrary, their freedom, their energy, their Christian tone and chivalrous loyalty, announce an originality and independence of character that prevent us from believing they could have been in any way materially indebted to the brilliant, but effeminate, literature of the nation to whose spirit every thing Spanish had, when they first appeared, been for ages implacably opposed. It seems, therefore, that they must, of their own nature, be as original as any poetry of modern times; containing, as they do, within themselves proofs that they are Spanish by their birth, natives of the soil, and stained with all its variations. For a long time, too, subsequent to that of their first appearance, they continued to exhibit the same elements of nationality; so that, until we approach the fall of Granada, we find in them neither a Moorish tone, nor Moorish subjects, nor Moorish adventures; nothing, in short, to justify us in supposing them to have been more indebted to the culture of the Arabs than was any other portion of the early Spanish literature.