One more fact will conclude what we know of their early history. It is, that ballads were found among the poetry of Don John Manuel, the nephew of Alfonso the Tenth, which Argote de Molina possessed, and intended to publish, but which is now lost.[186] This brings our slight knowledge of the whole subject down to the death of Don John in 1347. But from this period--the same with that of the Archpriest of Hita--we almost lose sight, not only of the ballads, but of all genuine Spanish poetry, whose strains seem hardly to have been heard during the horrors of the reign of Peter the Cruel, the contested succession of Henry of Trastamara, and the Portuguese wars of John the First. And even when its echoes come to us again in the weak reign of John the Second, which stretches down to the middle of the fifteenth century, it presents itself with few of the attributes of the old national character.[187] It is become of the court, courtly; and therefore, though the old and true-hearted ballads may have lost none of the popular favor, and were certainly preserved by the fidelity of popular tradition, we find no further distinct record of them until the end of this century and the beginning of the one that followed, when the mass of the people, whose feelings they embodied, rose to such a degree of consideration, that their peculiar poetry came into the place to which it was entitled, and which it has maintained ever since. This was in the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of Charles the Fifth. [186] Discurso, Conde Lucanor, ed. 1575, ff. 92. a, 93. b. The poetry contained in the Cancioneros Generales, from 1511 to 1573, and bearing the name of Don John Manuel, is, as we have already explained, the work of Don John Manuel of Portugal, who died in 1524. [187] The Marquis of Santillana, in his well-known letter, (Sanchez, Tom. I.,) speaks of the _Romances e cantares_, but very slightly. But these few historical notices of ballad poetry are, except those which point to its early origin, too slight to be of much value. Indeed, until after the middle of the sixteenth century, it is difficult to find ballads written by known authors; so that, when we speak of the Old Spanish Ballads, we do not refer to the few whose period can be settled with some accuracy, but to the great mass found in the “Romanceros Generales” and elsewhere, whose authors and dates are alike unknown. This mass consists of above a thousand old poems, unequal in length and still more unequal in merit, composed between the period when verse first appeared in Spain and the time when such verse as that of the ballads was thought worthy to be written down; the whole bearing to the mass of the Spanish people, their feelings, passions, and character, the same relations that a single ballad bears to the character of the individual author who produced it.