The poem afterwards relates the Cid’s contest with the Count of Barcelona; the taking of Valencia; the reconcilement of the Cid to the king, who had treated him so ill; and the marriage of the Cid’s two daughters, at the king’s request, to the two Counts of Carrion, who were among the first nobles of the kingdom. At this point, however, there is a somewhat formal division of the poem,[20] and the remainder is devoted to what is its principal subject, the dissolution of this marriage in consequence of the baseness and brutality of the Counts; the Cid’s public triumph over them; their no less public disgrace; and the announcement of the second marriage of the Cid’s daughters with the Infantes of Navarre and Aragon, which, of course, raised the Cid himself to the highest pitch of his honors, by connecting him with the royal houses of Spain. With this, therefore, the poem virtually ends. [20] This division, and some others less distinctly marked, have led Tapia (Historia de la Civilización de España, Madrid, 1840, 12mo, Tom. I. p. 268) to think, that the whole poem is but a congeries of ballads, as the Iliad has sometimes been thought to be, and, as there is little doubt, the Nibelungenlied really is. But such breaks occur so frequently in different parts of it, and seem so generally to be made for other reasons, that this conjecture is not probable. (Huber, Chrónica del Cid, p. xl.) Besides, the whole poem more resembles the Chansons de Geste of old French poetry, and is more artificial in its structure, than the nature of the ballad permits. The most spirited part of it consists of the scenes at the Cortes, summoned, on demand of the Cid, in consequence of the misconduct of the Counts of Carrion. In one of them, three followers of the Cid challenge three followers of the Counts, and the challenge of Munio Gustioz to Assur Gonzalez is thus characteristically given:--