Yet there are certainly few portions of the literature of any country that will better reward a spirit of adventurous inquiry than these ancient Spanish ballads, in all their forms. In many respects, they are unlike the earliest narrative poetry of any other part of the world; in some, they are better. The English and Scotch ballads, with which they may most naturally be compared, belong to a ruder state of society, where a personal coarseness and violence prevailed, which did not, indeed, prevent the poetry it produced from being full of energy, and sometimes of tenderness, but which necessarily had less dignity and elevation than belong to the character, if not the condition, of a people who, like the Spanish, were for centuries engaged in a contest ennobled by a sense of religion and loyalty; a contest which could not fail sometimes to raise the minds and thoughts of those engaged in it far above such an atmosphere as settled round the bloody feuds of rival barons or the gross maraudings of a border warfare. The truth of this will at once be felt, if we compare the striking series of ballads on Robin Hood with those on the Cid and Bernardo del Carpio; or if we compare the deep tragedy of Edom o’ Gordon with that of the Conde Alarcos; or what would be better than either, if we would sit down to the “Romancero General,” with its poetical confusion of Moorish splendors and Christian loyalty, just when we have come fresh from Percy’s “Reliques,” or Scott’s “Minstrelsy.”[226] [226] If we choose to strike more widely, and institute a comparison with the garrulous old Fabliaux, or with the overdone refinements of the Troubadours and Minnesingers, the result would be yet more in favor of the early Spanish ballads, which represent and embody the excited poetical feeling that filled the whole nation during that period when the Moorish power was gradually broken down by an enthusiasm that became at last irresistible, because, from the beginning, it was founded on a sense of loyalty and religious duty.