[385] Ebert cites the first edition known as of 1525; Bowle, in the list of his authorities, gives one of 1534; Clemencin says there is one of 1543 in the Royal Library at Madrid; and Pellicer used one of 1562. Which of these I have I do not know, as the colophon is gone and there is no date on the title-page; but its type and paper seem to indicate an edition from Antwerp, while all the preceding were printed in Spain. In all this, and especially in the wearisome series of its knightly adventures, the Lepolemo has a sufficient resemblance to the other romances of chivalry. But in two points it differs from them. In the first place, it pretends to be translated by Pedro de Luxan, its real author, from the Arabic of a wise magician attached to the person of the Sultan; and yet it represents its hero throughout as a most Christian knight, and his father and mother, the Emperor and Empress, as giving the force of their example to encourage pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre; making the whole story subserve the projects of the Church, in the same way, if not to the same degree, that Turpin’s Chronicle had done. And in the next place, it attracts our attention, from time to time, by a picturesque air and touches of the national manners, as, for instance, in the love passages between the Knight of the Cross and the Infanta of France, in one of which he talks to her at her grated balcony in the night, as if he were a cavalier of one of Calderon’s comedies.[386] Except in these points, however, the Lepolemo is much like its predecessors and followers, and quite as tedious. [386] See Parte I. c. 112, 144. Spain, however, not only gave romances of chivalry to the rest of Europe in large numbers, but received also from abroad in some good proportion to what she gave. From the first, the early French fictions were known in Spain, as we have seen by the allusions to them in the “Amadis de Gaula”; a circumstance that may have been owing either to the old connection with France through the Burgundian family, a branch of which filled the throne of Portugal, or to some strange accident, like the one that carried “Palmerin de Inglaterra” to Portugal from France rather than from Spain, its native country. At any rate, somewhat later, when the passion for such fictions was more developed, the French stories were translated or imitated in Spanish, and became a part, and a favored part, of the literature of the country. “The Romance of Merlin” was printed very early,--as early as 1498,--and “The Romance of Tristan de Leonnais,” and that of the Holy Cup, “La Demanda del Sancto Grial,” followed it as a sort of natural sequence.[387]