What strikes us most, however, and remains with us longest after reading his poetry, is the natural and spirited tone that prevails over every other. In this he is like Chaucer, who wrote a little later in the same century. Indeed, the resemblance between the two poets is remarkable in some other particulars. Both often sought their materials in the Northern French poetry; both have that mixture of devotion and a licentious immorality, much of which belonged to their age, but some of it to their personal character; and both show a wide knowledge of human nature, and a great happiness in sketching the details of individual manners. The original temper of each made him satirical and humorous; and each, in his own country, became the founder of some of the forms of its popular poetry, introducing new metres and combinations, and carrying them out in a versification which, though generally rude and irregular, is often flowing and nervous, and always natural. The Archpriest has not, indeed, the tenderness, the elevation, or the general power of Chaucer; but his genius has a compass, and his verse a skill and success, that show him to be more nearly akin to the great English master than will be believed, except by those who have carefully read the works of both. The Archpriest of Hita lived in the last years of Alfonso the Eleventh, and perhaps somewhat later. At the very beginning of the next reign, or in 1350, we find a curious poem addressed by a Jew of Carrion to Peter the Cruel, on his accession to the throne. In the manuscript found in the National Library at Madrid, it is called the “Book of the Rabi de Santob,” or “Rabbi Don Santob,” and consists of four hundred and seventy-six stanzas.[141] The measure is the old _redondilla_, uncommonly easy and flowing for the age; and the purpose of the poem is to give wise moral counsels to the new king, which the poet more than once begs him not to undervalue because they come from a Jew. [141] There are at least two manuscripts of the poems of this Jew, from which nothing has been published but a few poor extracts. The one commonly cited is that of the Escurial, used by Castro, (Biblioteca Española, Tom. I. pp. 198-202,) and by Sanchez (Tom. I. pp. 179-184, and Tom. IV. p. 12, etc.). The one I have used is in the National Library, Madrid, marked B. b. 82, folio, in which the poem of the Rabbi is found on leaves 61 to 81. Conde, the historian of the Arabs, preferred this manuscript to the one in the Escurial, and held the Rabbi’s true name to be given in it, viz. _Santob_, and not _Santo_, as it is in the manuscript of the Escurial; the latter being a name not likely to be taken by a Jew in the time of Peter the Cruel, though very likely to be written so by an ignorant monkish transcriber. The manuscript of Madrid begins thus, differing from that of the Escurial, as may be seen in Castro, ut sup.:--