What knight goes there, so false and fair, That thus for treason stood? Velasquez hight is that false knight, Who sold his brother’s blood. Where Almenar extends afar, He called his nephews forth, And on that plain he bade them gain A name of fame and worth. The Moors he shows, the common foes, And promises their rout; But while they stood, prepared for blood, A mighty host came out. Of Moorish men were thousands ten, With pennons flowing fair; Whereat each knight, as well he might, Inquired what host came there. “O, do not fear, my kinsmen dear,” The base Velasquez cried, “The Moors you see can never be Of power your shock to bide; I oft have met their craven set, And none dared face my might; So think no fear, my kinsmen dear, But boldly seek the fight.” Thus words deceive, and men believe, And falsehood thrives amain; And those brave knights, for Christian rights, Have sped across the plain; And men ten score, but not one more, To follow freely chose: So Velasquez base his kin and race Has bartered to their foes. But, as might be anticipated, the Cid was seized upon with the first formation of the language as the subject of popular poetry, and has been the occasion of more ballads than any other of the great heroes of Spanish history or fable.[212] They were first collected in a separate ballad-book as early as 1612, and have continued to be published and republished at home and abroad down to our own times.[213] It would be easy to find a hundred and sixty; some of them very ancient; some poetical; many prosaic and poor. The chronicles seem to have been little resorted to in their composition.[214] The circumstances of the Cid’s history, whether true or fictitious, were too well settled in the popular faith, and too familiar to all Christian Spaniards, to render the use of such materials necessary. No portion of the old ballads, therefore, is more strongly marked with the spirit of their age and country; and none constitutes a series so complete. They give us apparently the whole of the Cid’s history, which we find nowhere else entire; neither in the ancient poem, which does not pretend to be a life of him; nor in the prose chronicle, which does not begin so early in his story; nor in the Latin document, which is too brief and condensed. At the very outset, we have the following minute and living picture of the mortification and sufferings of Diego Laynez, the Cid’s father, in consequence of the blow he had received from Count Lozano, which his age rendered it impossible for him to avenge:-- [212] In the barbarous rhymed Latin poem, printed with great care by Sandoval, (Reyes de Castilla, Pamplona, 1615, f. 189, etc.,) and apparently written, as we have noticed, by some one who witnessed the siege of Almeria in 1147, we have the following lines:--