These picturesque adventures, chiefly without countenance from history, in which the French paladins appear associated with fabulous Spanish heroes, such as Montesinos and Durandarte,[203] and once with the noble Moor Calaynos, are represented with some minuteness in the old Spanish ballads. The largest number, including the longest and the best, are to be found in the ballad-book of 1550-1555, to which may be added a few from that of 1593-1597, making together somewhat more than fifty, of which only twenty occur in the collection expressly devoted to the Twelve Peers, and first published in 1608. Some of them are evidently very old; as, for instance, that on the Conde d’ Irlos, that on the Marquis of Mantua, two on Claros of Montalban, and both the fragments on Durandarte, the last of which can be traced back to the Cancionero of 1511.[204] [203] Montesinos and Durandarte figure so largely in Don Quixote’s visit to the cave of Montesinos, that all relating to them is to be found in the notes of Pellicer and Clemencin to Parte II. cap. 23, of the history of the mad knight. [204] These ballads begin, “Estabase el Conde d’ Irlos,” which is the longest I know of; “Assentado esta Gayferos,” which is one of the best, and cited more than once by Cervantes; “Media noche era por hilo,” where the counting of time by the dripping of water is a proof of antiquity in the ballad itself; “A caça va el Emperador,” also cited repeatedly by Cervantes; and “O Belerma, O Belerma,” translated by M. G. Lewis; to which may be added, “Durandarte, Durandarte,” found in the Antwerp Romancero, and in the old Cancioneros Generales. The ballads of this class are occasionally quite long, and approach the character of the old French and English metrical romances; that of the Conde d’ Irlos extending to about thirteen hundred lines. The longer ballads, too, are generally the best; and those, through large portions of which the same _asonante_, and sometimes, even, the same _consonante_ or full rhyme, is continued to the end, have a solemn harmony in their protracted cadences, that produces an effect on the feelings like the chanting of a rich and well-sustained recitative. Taken as a body, they have a grave tone, combined with the spirit of a picturesque narrative, and entirely different from the extravagant and romantic air afterwards given to the same class of fictions in Italy, and even from that of the few Spanish ballads which, at a later period, were constructed out of the imaginative and fantastic materials found in the poems of Bojardo and Ariosto. But in all ages and in all forms, they have been favorites with the Spanish people. They were alluded to as such above five hundred years ago, in the oldest of the national chronicles; and when, at the end of the last century, Sarmiento notices the ballad-book of the Twelve Peers, he speaks of it as one which the peasantry and the children of Spain still knew by heart.[205]