The old Spanish ballads have often a resemblance to each other in their tone and phraseology; and occasionally several seem imitated from some common original. Thus, in another, on this same subject of the Count de Saldaña’s imprisonment, we find the length of time he had suffered, and the idea of his relationship and blood, enforced in the following words, not of the Count himself, but of Bernardo, when addressing the king:-- The very walls are wearied there, So long in grief to hold A man whom first in youth they saw, And now see gray and old. And if, for errors such as these, The forfeit must be blood, Enough of his has flowed from me, When for your rights I stood.[208] [208] This is evidently among the older ballads. The earliest printed copy of it that I know is to be found in the “Flor de Romances,” Novena Parte, (Madrid, 1597, 18mo, f. 45,) and the passage I have translated is very striking in the original:-- Cansadas ya las paredes De guardar en tanto tiempo A un hombre, que vieron moço Y ya le ven cano y viejo. Si ya sus culpas merecen, Que sangre sea en su descuento, Harta suya he derramado, Y toda en servicio vuestro. It is given a little differently by Duran. In reading the ballads relating to Bernardo del Carpio, it is impossible not to be often struck with their resemblance to the corresponding passages of the “General Chronicle.” Some of them are undoubtedly copied from it; others possibly may have been, in more ancient forms, among the poetical materials out of which we know that Chronicle was in part composed.[209] The best are those which are least strictly conformed to the history itself; but all, taken together, form a curious and interesting series, that serves strikingly to exhibit the manners and feelings of the people in the wild times of which they speak, as well as in the later periods when many of them must have been written. [209] The ballad beginning “En Corte del casto Alfonso,” in the ballad-book of 1555, is taken from the “Crónica General,” (Parte III. ff. 32, 33, ed. 1604,) as the following passage, speaking of Bernardo’s first knowledge that his father was the Count of Saldaña, will show:-- _Quando_ Bernaldo _lo supo Pesóle_ a gran demasia, Tanto que _dentro en el cuerpo La sangre se le volvia_. Yendo _para su posada_ Muy grande llanto hacia, _Vistióse paños de luto_, Y delante el Rey se iba. _El Rey quando_ asi _le vió_, Desta suerte le decía: “_Bernaldo_, por aventura _Cobdicias la muerte mia_?”