and concurring so nearly, leave no reasonable doubt that it was composed as early as the year 1200. Mr. Southey’s name, introduced by me in this note, is one that must always be mentioned with peculiar respect by scholars interested in Spanish literature. From the circumstance, that his uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill, a scholar, and a careful and industrious one, was connected with the English Factory at Lisbon, Mr. Southey visited Spain and Portugal in 1795-6, when he was about twenty-two years old, and, on his return home, published his Travels, in 1797;--a pleasant book, written in the clear, idiomatic, picturesque English that always distinguishes his style, and containing a considerable number of translations from the Spanish and the Portuguese, made with freedom and spirit rather than with great exactness. From this time he never lost sight of Spain and Portugal, or of Spanish and Portuguese literature; as is shown, not only by several of his larger original works, but by his translations, and by his articles in the London Quarterly Review on Lope de Vega and Camoens; especially by one in the second volume of that journal, which was translated into Portuguese, with notes, by Müller, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Lisbon, and so made into an excellent compact manual for Portuguese literary history. The Cid himself, who is to be found constantly commemorated in Spanish poetry, was born in the northwestern part of Spain, about the year 1040, and died in 1099, at Valencia, which he had rescued from the Moors.[8] His original name was Ruy Diaz, or Rodrigo Diaz; and he was by birth one of the considerable barons of his country. The title of _Cid_, by which he is almost always known, is believed to have come to him from the remarkable circumstance, that five Moorish kings or chiefs acknowledged him in one battle as their _Seid_, or their lord and conqueror;[9] and the title of _Campeador_, or Champion, by which he is hardly less known, though it is commonly supposed to have been given to him as a leader of the armies of Sancho the Second, has long since been used almost exclusively as a popular expression of the admiration of his countrymen for his exploits against the Moors.[10] At any rate, from a very early period, he has been called _El Cid Campeador_, or The Lord Champion. And he well deserved the honorable title; for he passed almost the whole of his life in the field against the oppressors of his country, suffering, so far as we know, scarcely a single defeat from the common enemy, though, on more than one occasion, he was exiled and sacrificed by the Christian princes to whose interests he had attached himself.