[43] The works attributed to Alfonso are:--IN PROSE: 1. Crónica General de España, to be noticed hereafter. 2. A Universal History, containing an abstract of the history of the Jews. 3. A Translation of the Bible. 4. El Libro del Tesoro, a work on general philosophy; but Sarmiento, in a MS. which I possess, says that this is a translation of the Tesoro of Brunetto Latini, Dante’s master, and that it was not made by order of Alfonso; adding, however, that he has seen a book entitled “Flores de Filosofía,” which professes to have been compiled by this king’s command, and may be the work here intended. 5. The Tábulas Alfonsinas, or Astronomical Tables. 6. Historia de todo el Suceso de Ultramar, to be noticed presently. 7. El Espéculo ó Espejo de todos los Derechos; El Fuero Real, and other laws published in the Opúsculos Legales del Rey Alfonso el Sabio (ed. de la Real Academia de Historia, Madrid, 1836, 2 tom., fol.). 8. Las Siete Partidas.--IN VERSE: 1. Another Tesoro. 2. Las Cántigas. 3. Two stanzas of the Querellas. Several of these works, like the Universal History and the Ultramar, were, as we know, only compiled by his order, and in others he must have been much assisted. But the whole mass shows how wide were his views, and how great must have been his influence on the language, the literature, and the intellectual progress of his country. Of his poetry, we possess, besides works of very doubtful genuineness, two, about one of which there has been little question, and about the other none; his “Cántigas,” or Chants, in honor of the Madonna, and his “Tesoro,” a treatise on the transmutation of the baser metals into gold. Of the Cántigas, there are extant no less than four hundred and one, composed in lines of from six to twelve syllables, and rhymed with a considerable degree of exactness.[44] Their measure and manner are Provençal. They are devoted to the praises and the miracles of the Madonna, in whose honor the king founded in 1279 a religious and military order;[45] and in devotion to whom, by his last will, he directed these poems to be perpetually chanted in the church of Saint Mary of Murcia, where he desired his body might be buried.[46] Only a few of them have been printed; but we have enough to show what they are, and especially that they are written, not in the Castilian, like the rest of his works, but in the Galician; an extraordinary circumstance, for which it does not seem easy to give a satisfactory reason.