For a long time, of course, these primitive national ballads existed only in the memories of the common people, from whom they sprang, and were preserved through successive ages and long traditions only by the interests and feelings that originally gave them birth. We cannot, therefore, reasonably hope that we now read any of them exactly as they were first composed and sung, or that there are many to which we can assign a definite age with any good degree of probability. No doubt, we may still possess some which, with little change in their simple thoughts and melody, were among the earliest breathings of that popular enthusiasm which, between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, was carrying the Christian Spaniards onward to the emancipation of their country; ballads which were heard amidst the valleys of the Sierra Morena, or on the banks of the Turia and the Guadalquivir, with the first tones of the language that has since spread itself through the whole Peninsula. But the idle minstrel, who, in such troubled times, sought a precarious subsistence from cottage to cottage, or the thoughtless soldier, who, when the battle was over, sung its achievements to his guitar at the door of his tent, could not be expected to look beyond the passing moment; so that, if their unskilled verses were preserved at all, they must have been preserved by those who repeated them from memory, changing their tone and language with the changed feelings of the times and events that chanced to recall them. Whatever, then, belongs to this earliest period belongs, at the same time, to the unchronicled popular life and character of which it was a part; and although many of the ballads thus produced may have survived to our own day, many more, undoubtedly, lie buried with the poetical hearts that gave them birth. This, indeed, is the great difficulty in relation to all researches concerning the oldest Spanish ballads. The very excitement of the national spirit that warmed them into life was the result of an age of such violence and suffering, that the ballads it produced failed to command such an interest as would cause them to be written down. Individual poems, like that of the Cid, or the works of individual authors, like those of the Archpriest of Hita or Don John Manuel, were, of course, cared for, and, perhaps, from time to time transcribed. But the popular poetry was neglected. Even when the special “Cancioneros”--which were collections of whatever verses the person who formed them happened to fancy, or was able to find[188]--began to come in fashion, during the reign of John the Second, the bad taste of the time caused the old national literature to be so entirely overlooked, that not a single ballad occurs in either of them.