The proof that the “Partidas” were in advance of their age, both as to style and language, is plain, not only from the examination we have made of what preceded them, but from a comparison of them, which we must now make, with the poetry of Juan Lorenzo Segura, who lived at the time they were compiled, and probably somewhat later. Like Berceo, he was a secular priest, and he belonged to Astorga; but this is all we know of him, except that he lived in the latter part of the thirteenth century, and has left a poem of above ten thousand lines on the life of Alexander the Great, drawn from such sources as were then accessible to a Spanish ecclesiastic, and written in the four-line stanza used by Berceo.[78] [78] The Alexandro fills the third volume of the Poesías Anteriores of Sanchez, and was for a long time strangely attributed to Alfonso the Wise, (Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana Vetus, ed. Bayer, Matriti, 1787-8, fol., Tom. II. p. 79, and Mondejar, Memorias, pp. 458, 459,) though the last lines of the poem itself declare its author to be Johan Lorenzo Segura. What is most obvious in this long poem is its confounding the manners of a well-known age of Grecian antiquity with those of the Catholic religion, and of knighthood, as they existed in the days of its author. Similar confusion is found in some portion of the early literature of every country in modern Europe. In all, there was a period when the striking facts of ancient history, and the picturesque fictions of ancient fable, floating about among the traditions of the Middle Ages, were seized upon as materials for poetry and romance; and when, to fill up and finish the picture presented by their imaginations to those who thus misapplied an imperfect knowledge of antiquity, the manners and feelings of their own times were incongruously thrown in, either from an ignorant persuasion that none other had ever existed, or from a wilful carelessness concerning every thing but poetical effect. This was the case in Italy, from the first dawning of letters till after the time of Dante; the sublime and tender poetry of whose “Divina Commedia” is full of such absurdities and anachronisms. It was the case, too, in France; examples singularly in point being found in the Latin poem of Walter de Chatillon, and the French one by Alexandre de Paris, on this same subject of Alexander the Great; both of which were written nearly a century before Juan Lorenzo lived, and both of which were used by him.[79] And it was the case in England, till after the time of Shakspeare, whose “Midsummer Night’s Dream” does all that genius can do to justify it. We must not, therefore, be surprised to find it in Spain, where, derived from such monstrous repositories of fiction as the works of Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis, Guido de Colonna and Walter de Chatillon, some of the histories and fancies of ancient times already filled the thoughts of those men who were unconsciously