_Ballads on Manners and Private Life._--But the ballad poetry of Spain was not confined to heroic subjects drawn from romance or history, or to subjects depending on Moorish traditions and manners; and therefore, though these are the three largest classes into which it is divided, there is yet a fourth, which may be called miscellaneous, and which is of no little moment. For, in truth, the poetical feelings even of the lower portions of the Spanish people were spread out over more subjects than we should anticipate; and their genius, which, from the first, had a charter as free as the wind, has thus left us a vast number of records, that prove at least the variety of the popular perceptions, and the quickness and tenderness of the popular sensibility. Many of the miscellaneous ballads thus produced--perhaps most of them--are effusions of love; but many are pastoral, many are burlesque, satirical, and _picaresque_; many are called _Letrillas_, but have nothing epistolary about them except the name; many are lyrical in their tone, if not in their form; and many are descriptive of the manners and amusements of the people at large. But one characteristic runs through the whole of them. They are true representations of Spanish life. Some of those first printed have already been referred to; but there is a considerable class marked by an attractive simplicity of thought and expression, united to a sort of mischievous shrewdness, that should be particularly noticed. No such popular poetry exists in any other language. A number of these ballads occur in the peculiarly valuable Sixth Part of the Romancero, that appeared in 1594, and was gathered by Pedro Flores, as he himself tells us, in part least, from the memories of the common people.[224] They remind us not unfrequently of the lighter poetry of the Archpriest of Hita in the middle of the fourteenth century, and may, probably, be traced back in their tone and spirit to a yet earlier period. Indeed, they are quite a prominent and charming part of all the earliest Romanceros, not a few of them being as simple, and yet as shrewd and humorous, as the following, in which an elder sister is represented lecturing a younger one, on first noticing in her the symptoms of love:-- [224] For example, “Que es de mi contento,” “Plega á Dios que si yo creo,” “Aquella morena,” “Madre, un cavallero,” “Mal ayan mis ojos,” “Niña, que vives,” etc. Her sister Miguela Once child little Jane, And the words that she spoke Gave a great deal of pain. “You went yesterday playing, A child like the rest; And now you come out, More than other girls dressed. “You take pleasure in sighs, In sad music delight; With the dawning you rise, Yet sit up half the night. “When you take up your work, You look vacant and stare, And gaze on your sampler, But miss the stitch there.