Nor has he shown in this exhibition more spirit or power than his Spanish predecessor. Indeed, sometimes he has fallen into considerable errors, which are wholly his own. By compressing the time of the action within twenty-four hours, instead of suffering it to extend through many months, as it does in the original, he is guilty of the absurdity of overcoming Ximena’s natural feelings in relation to the person who had killed her father, while her father’s dead body is still before her eyes. By changing the scene of the quarrel, which in Guillen occurs in presence of the king, he has made it less grave and natural. By a mistake in chronology, he establishes the Spanish court at Seville two centuries before that city was wrested from the Moors. And by a general straitening of the action within the conventional limits which were then beginning to bind down the French stage, he has, it is true, avoided the extravagance of introducing, as Guillen does, so incongruous an episode out of the old ballads as the miracle of Saint Lazarus; but he has hindered the free and easy movement of the incidents, and diminished their general effect. Guillen, on the contrary, by taking the traditions of his country just as he found them, instantly conciliated the good-will of his audience, and at the same time imparted the freshness of the old ballad spirit to his action, and gave to it throughout a strong national air and coloring. Thus, the scene in the royal council, where the father of the Cid is struck by the haughty Count Lozano, several of the scenes between the Cid and Ximena, and several between both of them and the king, are managed with great dramatic skill and a genuine poetical fervor. The following passage, where the Cid’s father is waiting for him in the evening twilight at the place appointed for their meeting after the duel, is as characteristic, if not as striking, as any in the drama, and is superior to the corresponding passage in the French play, which occurs in the fifth and sixth scenes of the third act.